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Banyak hewan-hewan di Alaska, jika kamu pergi ke tempat yang liar, kamu akan menemukan beberapa hewan seperti karibu,rusa besar, serigala dan beruang. Ketika hewan datang ke daerah dengan manusia seperti rusa, mereka membuat masalah bagi tukang kebun karena memakan tanaman di kebun. Banyak orang-orang Alaska memelihara anjing, karena anjing mereka bisa mengikuti kompetensi pada bidang olahraga.

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In a complaint to the Internal Revenue Service, a whistleblower alleges that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has amassed about $100 billion in accounts intended for charitable purposes, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Post. The confidential document accuses church leaders of misleading members by stockpiling their surplus donations instead of using them for charitable works. It also accuses church leaders of using the tax-exempt donations to prop up a pair of businesses. The complaint provides a window into the closely held finances of one of the nation’s most visible religious organizations, based in Salt Lake City. It details a church fortune far exceeding past estimates and encompassing stocks, bonds and cash.

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A former investment manager alleges in a whistleblower complaint to the Internal Revenue Service that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has amassed about $100 billion in accounts intended for charitable purposes, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Washington Post.

The confidential document, received by the IRS on Nov. 21, accuses church leaders of misleading members - and possibly breaching federal tax rules - by stockpiling their surplus donations instead of using them for charitable works. It also accuses church leaders of using the tax-exempt donations to prop up a pair of businesses.

The church did not respond to detailed questions from The Post about the complaint and said in a statement Monday that it does not discuss specific financial transactions. On Tuesday, after the first version of this story was published, the church said it takes seriously its responsiblity to care for members' donations.

"Claims being currently circulated are based on a narrow perspective and limited information," said a statement attributed to the church's First Presidency, its top governing body. "The Church complies with all applicable law governing our donations, investments, taxes, and reserves."

The complaint provides a window into the closely held finances of one of the nation's most visible religious organizations, based in Salt Lake City. It details a church fortune far exceeding past estimates and encompassing stocks, bonds and cash.

The complaint was filed by David A. Nielsen, a 41-year-old Mormon who worked until September as a senior portfolio manager at the church's investment division, a company named Ensign Peak Advisors that is based near the church's headquarters.

Nonprofit organizations, including religious groups, are exempted in the United States from paying taxes on their income. Ensign is registered with authorities as a supporting organization and integrated auxiliary of the Mormon Church. This permits it to operate as a nonprofit and to make money largely free from U.S. taxes.

The exemption requires that Ensign operate exclusively for religious, educational or other charitable purposes, a condition that Nielsen says the firm has not met.

In a declaration signed under penalty of perjury, Nielsen urges the IRS to strip the nonprofit of its tax-exempt status and alleges that Ensign could owe billions in taxes. He is seeking a reward from the IRS, which offers whistleblowers a cut of unpaid taxes that it recovers.

Nielsen did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails seeking comment.

His twin brother, Lars P. Nielsen, provided a copy of the complaint to The Post, along with dozens of supporting documents. Lars Nielsen, a health-care consultant in Minnesota, said he prepared the complaint with his brother and helped him submit it to the IRS.

Lars Nielsen said in a statement to The Post that his brother asked him to write an exposé on his former employer.

"Having seen tens of billions in contributions and scores more in investment returns come in, and having seen nothing except two unlawful distributions to for-profit concerns go out, he was dejected beyond words, and so was I," Lars Nielsen wrote.

He said he was coming forward without his brother's approval because he believed the information was too important to remain confidential. "I know that sometimes newspapers use anonymous sources," he said. "But that is usually not best for a story."

In remarks last year, a high-ranking cleric in the church, Bishop Gérald Caussé, said it "pays taxes on any income it derives from revenue-producing activities that are regularly carried on and are not substantially related to its tax-exempt purposes."

The church typically collects about $7 billion each year in contributions from members, according to the complaint. Mormons, like members of some other faith groups, are asked to contribute 10 percent of their income to the church, a practice known as tithing.

While about $6 billion of that income is used to cover annual operating costs, the remaining $1 billion or so is transferred to Ensign, which plows some into an investment portfolio to generate returns, according to the complaint.

Based on internal accounting documents from February 2018, the complaint estimates the portfolio has grown in value from $12 billion in 1997, when Ensign was formed, to about $100 billion today.

The church also owns real estate worth billions of dollars, according to the complaint, which focuses on surplus tithing money and says that the church may have additional holdings not managed by Ensign.

While accumulating this wealth, Ensign has not directly funded any religious, educational or charitable activities in 22 years, the complaint said. No documents are provided to support this claim, which is attributed to information David Nielsen gleaned from working at the company.

Philip Hackney, a former IRS official who teaches tax law at the University of Pittsburgh, said the complaint raised a "legitimate concern" about whether the church's investment arm deserved its tax-exempt status.

"If you have a charity that simply amasses a war chest year after year and does not spend any money for charity purposes, that does not meet the requirements of tax law," Hackney said in an interview. Hackney, who served in the IRS chief counsel's office, has been retained by The Post to analyze the whistleblower documents.

IRS rules dictate that a nonprofit organization must carry out charitable activity that is "commensurate in scope with its financial resources" to maintain its tax-exempt status. No threshold for this test is specified, and the agency instead considers examples case by case.

In its statement Tuesday, the church said the "vast majority" of the funds it receives from donations are "used immediately to meet the needs of the growing Church," including temples, education and missionary work.

"Over many years, a portion is methodically safeguarded through wise financial management and the building of a prudent reserve for the future," the statement said. "This is a sound doctrinal and financial principle taught by the Savior in the Parable of the Talents and lived by the Church and its members. All Church funds exist for no other reason than to support the Church's divinely appointed mission."

Details of the church's expenditures on charitable work are not publicly available, but in a lecture at the University of Oxford in 2016, a senior elder said the church had spent about $40 million a year over the past 30 years on welfare, humanitarian aid and other international projects. He did not mention Ensign. The church said in a report last year that its charitable arm had spent $2.2 billion in assistance since 1985, but did not provide a breakdown on spending.

[Have you worked for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day-Saints? Tell us your experiences with this confidential form.]

While declining to discuss the extent of their holdings, church leaders have sought to explain the practice of continuing to collect tithes while accumulating financial reserves.

In a speech in March 2018, Caussé linked the church's financial strategy to the "prophecies about the last days." Just as the church maintains grain silos and emergency warehouses, Caussé said, so it "also methodically follows the practice of setting aside a portion of its revenues each year to prepare for any possible future needs."

According to the complaint, Ensign's president, Roger Clarke, has told others that the amassed funds would be used in the event of the second coming of Christ. Clarke did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Nielsen's complaint is sharply critical of church leaders for continuing to ask for tithes, even from members who are struggling financially, while the church sits on a fortune. "Would you pay tithing instead of water, electricity, or feeding your family if you knew that it would sit around by the billions until the Second Coming of Christ?" he wrote in a 74-page narrative that accompanied his complaint.

He suggests church leaders favor continuing to collect tithes to avoid "losing control over their members' behavior" by releasing them from their financial obligations. In June, the church raised the monthly charge paid by most families to cover the cost of their children serving as missionaries from $400 to $500 per month.

Leaders have consistently tried to downplay speculation about the extent of the church's wealth. Quoting a former church president during the speech last year, Caussé, said: "When all is said and done, the only real wealth of the church is in the faith of its people."

When interviewed by a German reporter in 2002 about suggestions that the church had amassed billions, then-President Gordon B. Hinckley said: "Yes, if you count all of our assets, yes, we are well-off. But those assets, you have to know this, are not money-producing. Those assets are money-consuming."

Unlike other nonprofits, religious organizations are not required to publicly report their income or assets.

Nielsen's estimate of Ensign's assets places the Mormon investment organization among some of the country's wealthiest companies and charities. Microsoft, Alphabet and Apple each hold between $100 billion and $136 billion in cash, according to the most recent company filings, while Harvard University has the country's largest academic endowment at $40.9 billion. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private philanthropic foundation in the world at $47.8 billion.

In addition to criticizing the scale of wealth accumulated by the church, Nielsen's complaint accuses church leaders of acting improperly on the rare occasions that funds have been paid out from the investment division.

According to Nielsen, $2 billion from Ensign has been used over the past decade to bail out a church-run insurance company and a shopping mall in Salt Lake City that was a joint venture between the church and a major real estate company.

Citing an internal presentation that he includes as an exhibit, Nielsen alleges that in 2009, Ensign spent funds on rescuing the insurance firm, Beneficial Life, which was suffering from its exposure to mortgage-backed securities amid the financial crisis.

At the time, a church-owned newspaper reported that a different commercial church company, Deseret Management, had injected $594 million into Beneficial Life to make up its deficit. Mark Willes, Deseret Management's president and chief executive, was reported to have said that no tithing money was used in the transaction.

Yet the internal presentation supplied to the IRS by Nielsen refers to a $600 million "withdrawal" from Ensign to Beneficial Life in 2009, citing a page from an Ensign slide presentation entitled "Framework and Exposures" and dated March 2013. Nielsen said the funds were taken specifically from the Ensign account that receives surplus tithing. Nielsen said the transfer was not treated as a loan and was not recorded as an investment on Ensign's balance sheet.

Despite the bailout, Beneficial Life announced it would terminate 150 of its 214 Utah workers and stop writing new insurance policies.

Neither Willes nor an official from Beneficial Life responded to messages seeking comment.

Nielsen's complaint further alleges that between 2009 and 2014, Ensign pumped $1.4 billion in several installments into the City Creek Center, a shopping mall in downtown Salt Lake City featuring a retractable roof. The mall, partly owned by the church, had also been hit by the financial crisis.

Amid complaints from members about the church venturing into retail, church leaders have repeatedly made assurances over several years that no money from tithes would be spent on developing the mall, a joint venture with the Taubman real estate group.

"I wish to give the entire church the assurance that tithing funds have not and will not be used to acquire this property. Nor will they be used in developing it for commercial purposes," Hinckley said when plans for the mall were unveiled in 2003.

On Monday, the church told The Post that through its involvement in the City Creek mall, it had "increased local economic activity during a financial downturn and attracted visitors and residents to Salt Lake City's historic downtown."

A Taubman spokeswoman declined to comment.

Hackney, the University of Pittsburgh tax law expert, said the payments would raise red flags if they were indeed made to for-profit entities that were separate from Ensign and not recorded as investments.

While the church may argue Ensign contributes to a broader religious and charitable mission, as a separate corporate entity, it must show that "it furthers a charitable purpose exclusively on its own," Hackney said.

"Once that money comes in, it's gotta go back out," he said. "They have to come up with a justification based on the entity alone. Looking at the other organizations shouldn't be a means of justifying hoarding."

IRS rules state that nonprofits "must not provide a substantial benefit to private interests" and that the earnings of registered religious organizations must not benefit "any private individual or shareholder" to avoid jeopardizing tax-exempt status.

The Mormon Church's wealth and investment acumen has been widely reported. A Time magazine cover story, "Mormons, Inc.," published in 1997, estimated the church's total assets at $30 billion or more. A 2012 Reuters article reported that the church owned "about $35 billion worth of temples and meeting houses around the world, and controls farms, ranches, shopping malls and other commercial ventures worth many billions more."

Nielsen's complaint comes as many Mormons across the United States are engaged in discussions with their bishops, traditionally held in December, to "settle" their dues to the church. His estimate of $7 billion in annual revenue points to a relatively high rate of contributions from the 15 million members. By comparison, the Catholic church in the United States was reported in 2005 to receive $8 billion in annual tithes. There were 75 million Catholics in the U.S. in 2010, according to Pew Research Center.

The complaint filed by Nielsen comprised a signed Form 211, the formal piece of IRS paperwork for reporting tax avoidance, a notarized cover letter to officials, plus the 74-page narrative document co-written with his brother in which he detailed his allegations at length.

These documents were sent to the IRS whistleblower office in Ogden, Utah, together with a thumb drive containing digital versions of documents and emails that Nielsen collected during his time at Ensign, the complaint says. He also provided information on Ensign's bank accounts and a list of employees whom officials should contact.

Nielsen told Ensign in a resignation letter dated Aug. 29 that his employment had become unworkable after his wife and children left the Mormon Church and asked him to follow them, according to a copy of the letter provided by Lars Nielsen. David Nielsen offered to continue working until Oct. 4.

Ensign's human resources director told him in a reply that managers had decided it would be best to terminate his employment Sept. 3.

"We appreciate your years of service and the contributions you have made for the church," the letter concluded.

The complaint describes an aggressive guarding of information by leaders at Ensign. Ensign employees "are trained to be especially sensitive" about data flowing outside the corporation, the complaint states. "Of course, all corporations need to guard their information, but the lengths that [Ensign] goes to borders on paranoia."

Only four senior Ensign executives are permitted to see the company's full financial statements, according to the complaint, and investment staff members may access information only on the Ensign assets relating to their own area of work.

Little has been publicly disclosed by Ensign, whose website address redirects readers to the church's homepage.

The company files abbreviated annual tax returns that report the taxes it paid on the small fraction of its investment activity that is taxable. The returns, which are publicly available, show that in some recent years, the company has reported losses of millions of dollars - a period in which, according to the complaint, a fuller accounting of its operations would have shown billions of dollars in profits.

This limited type of tax return requires Ensign to disclose the total value of its holdings, which the complaint asserts, has for years run to tens of billions of dollars. On those returns, Ensign has sometimes stated that it held $1 million, other times "more than $1,000,000," and it once left this section of the paperwork unfilled.

During his 2002 interview with a German reporter, Hinckley was told that several major denominations in Germany published records of their finances. Why not the Mormons?

"We simply think that information belongs to those who made the contribution, and not to the world," said Hinckley, who died in 2008.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Catholics in the U.S., a population of 75 million in 2010, not 170 million. A graphic accompanying this story overstated the size of Harvard's endowment, which is $40.9 billion, not $49.3 billion. The story has also been updated to include additional statements from the church about its charitable giving.

Steven Rich and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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church of jesus christ of latter day saints

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Mormon Church has misled members on $100 billion tax-exempt investment fund, whistleblower alleges

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A former investment manager accused the church of stockpiling surplus donations from members instead of using them for charitable works, according to a copy of his complaint to the IRS. He also accused church leaders of using the donations to prop up a pair of businesses.

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When Chrystul Kizer (pictured above) was 16, she met a 33-year-old man named Randy Volar. Volar had sex with Chrystul multiple times. He filmed it. She wasn’t the only one — and in February 2018, police arrested Volar on charges including child sexual assault. But then, they released him without bail. Volar, a white man, remained free for three months, even after police discovered evidence that he was abusing about a dozen underage black girls. He remained free until Chrystul, then 17, went to his house one night in June and allegedly shot him in the head, twice. She lit his body on fire, police said, and fled in his car. A few days later, she confessed and was charged with arson and first-degree intentional homicide, an offense that carries a mandatory life sentence in Wisconsin. Chrystul, now 19, maintains she was defending herself.

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Now Chrystul Kizer, who was 16 when she met Randy Volar, is accused of murdering her alleged sex trafficker. She faces life in prison.

By

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Metal cuffs strained against her ankles as she shuffled down the courthouse hallway. She passed her mother, who had grown used to seeing her teen daughter in a jail uniform. She passed the activists, who saw her as a victim of child sex trafficking.

She entered the courtroom, where she was facing life in prison on charges of murdering her alleged sex trafficker.

"The court calls 18CF643," said the judge at this November hearing. "State of Wisconsin versus Chrystul Kizer."

Chrystul looked up at him, then down at her hands. She sat between the public defenders assigned to her when she couldn't afford her own lawyer. Beside them was the district attorney, the lead prosecutor for Kenosha County, a lakefront community of about 169,000 people between Milwaukee and Chicago.

Both sides agreed to certain facts about what had brought them here:

When Chrystul was 16, she met a 33-year-old man named Randy Volar.

Volar sexually abused Chrystul multiple times.

He filmed it.

She wasn't the only one - and in February 2018, police arrested Volar on charges including child sexual assault. But then, they released him without bail.

Volar, a white man, remained free for three months, even after police discovered evidence that he was abusing about a dozen underage black girls.

He remained free until Chrystul, then 17, went to his house one night in June and allegedly shot him in the head, twice. She lit his body on fire, police said, and fled in his car.

A few days later, she confessed. District Attorney Michael Graveley, whose office knew about the evidence against Volar but waited to prosecute him, charged Chrystul with arson and first-degree intentional homicide, an offense that carries a mandatory life sentence in Wisconsin.

Graveley says he believes Chrystul's crime was premeditated. The evidence, he argues, shows she planned to murder Volar so she could steal his BMW.

Chrystul, now 19, maintains she was defending herself. Speaking publicly from jail for the first time, she said that when she told Volar she didn't want to have sex that night, he pinned her to the floor.

"I didn't intentionally try to do this," she said.

Her case comes at a time when police and prosecutors across the country are reevaluating how victims of sex trafficking should be treated. This year, Tennessee released Cyntoia Brown, whose story went viral in the midst of the #MeToo movement. She went to prison at age 16 and served 15 years for killing a man who purchased her for sex.

Brown's story, along with the downfall of financier Jeffrey Epstein and singer R. Kelly, reveal what most child sex trafficking actually looks like in America: vulnerable kids, not kidnapped and held captive, not chained and smuggled across borders, but groomed by someone they trust and manipulated into believing they are the ones to blame for the abuse.

Under federal law, all children who are bought or sold for sex are trafficking victims, regardless of the circumstances. Thirty states and the District have stopped charging minors with prostitution.

Most states also have a law that gives sex-trafficking victims an "affirmative defense." If they can prove at trial they committed a crime because they were being trafficked, they can be acquitted of certain charges against them.

Wisconsin is one of those states - and Chrystul wanted to use that law to defend her actions. Despite prosecutors' certainty that her crime was premeditated, her lawyer argues she still has a complete defense to the charges.

But the affirmative defense law has never been used in a homicide or any other violent crime. Not in Wisconsin and, as far as advocates know, not anywhere else.

At this hearing, the judge was going to decide whether it could be.

With handcuffs on her wrists, Chrystul pulled at the rosary around her neck. Behind her, the courtroom was filled with her supporters and with members of Volar's family.

"Your honor," her lawyer began, and Chrystul listened closely as the men debated what she deserved.

'House is burning!'

Just after 5 a.m. on the morning of June 5, 2018, a woman looked out the window of her Kenosha home and spotted flames on the roof of the tiny tan ranch house on the corner. She punched 911 into her phone.

"Fire!" she told the dispatcher. "House is burning!"

"Do you know if anyone is in the house?" the dispatcher asked.

Listen to the 911 call

"Fire! House is burning!" (0:57)

Within two minutes, Kenosha police arrived to find the answer. Inside, a badly charred body lay slumped on the ground. There were two gunshot wounds in the head.

Dispatchers said that earlier that year, the house was involved in a call about a runaway child. Officers didn't yet know the details of that case, but it did give them a name for the homeowner: Randall Phillip Volar III, who went by Randy.

Police combed the house for evidence. Alcohol bottles on the floor. A pizza box in the fridge. Multiple hotel room keys. Credit card records showed that the night before, he paid for an Uber from Milwaukee to his home. The Uber driver told police he had given a ride to a short black girl named "Chrystal."

Neighbors reported that there was usually a BMW in Volar's driveway. The car was found abandoned in Milwaukee. A receipt inside led police to a Family Dollar store, where security footage revealed that four teens had driven the BMW. One of them said he had a sister named Chrystul Kizer.

Police found her Facebook page, filled with photos of a slender girl who wore long, colorful wigs. On the night of the fire, she posted a selfie at 3:10 a.m. Behind her were curtains detectives recognized from Volar's house. The caption: "My Mug Shot."

Three days later, Chrystul live-streamed on Facebook. She talked about giving her brother a BMW. She showed off a gun. She told her 20-year-old boyfriend, Delane Nelson, "I don't want to shoot anybody else."

The next morning, police drove a battering ram into Nelson's front door. They found Chrystul inside, a shower cap on her head. Zip ties were placed around her wrists as she was escorted into a squad car.

Her bail was set at $1 million.

As they investigated Chrystul, detectives were gathering information about Volar. He lived alone in the cramped 360-square-foot, one-bedroom house. He graduated from high school in 2001 and described himself as self-employed. He was 5 foot 8 inches tall and about 200 pounds. His autopsy showed he had been born with missing fingers and toes, and a right leg shorter than the left. His parents divorced in 2009, and three years later, Volar wore a suit and a red rose boutonniere to be the best man for his father, Randall P. Volar Jr., when he remarried at a golf resort.

But most of what detectives needed to know was already sitting in a police file. The "runaway" report mentioned by dispatchers was actually something much more serious: a sex crimes investigation that had been underway for months.

It began with another 911 call, this one just before 1 a.m. on Feb. 12, 2018. According to police reports obtained by The Washington Post, a 15-year-old girl calling from Volar's house told dispatchers that a man had given her drugs, and now he was going to kill her. Then, she hung up.

Officers found her wandering the streets, wearing only a bra under an unzipped jacket. Her pupils were dilated. She said she had taken LSD.

The girl eventually told police she met Volar the year before when he responded to an ad on Backpage.com. The site was one of the country's largest prostitution marketplaces until it was shut down for involvement in human trafficking last year. The girl said Volar paid her $250 for sex the first time they met - when she was 14 - then $100 each time after that.

She told police he knew how old she was, because when she suggested he find women his own age, he elaborated on why he preferred the bodies of young girls like her.

In December 2017, the girl ran away from home and moved in with Volar. He gave her money, took her shopping and even took her out to dinner with his mother, she said.

The girl showed signs of what sex crimes experts call "trauma bonding." Volar was nice to her, she said, and she didn't want to get him in trouble. She called him her "friend."

She said Volar was sexually abusing other underage girls, too - and filming it. She'd seen the videos.

"Sometimes he goes to Milwaukee to find young girls," the police report said. She told detectives the first names of at least three of them, including one named "Chrystal."

On Feb. 22, police searched Volar's house. They confiscated laptops, hard drives and memory cards, along with women's pajamas, bikini bottoms and underwear.

Volar was arrested. The charges: child enticement, using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime and second-degree sexual assault of a child, a felony punishable by up to 40 years in state prison.

Miriam Falk, a veteran sex crimes prosecutor in Wisconsin, said those charges typically lead to a substantial cash bail, upward of $100,000 if the person involved is wealthy. Add in video evidence and the case would be a "dream" for prosecutors. "That would be a very difficult case to defend," Falk said.

But on the same day police arrested Volar, they released him. Records indicate he paid no bail but was told he would be summoned to court.

The court summons never came.

Volar spent $20,000 to hire a criminal defense attorney, but three months passed before police sent the case to the district attorney's office. The file showed what was found in Volar's house: "hundreds" of child pornography videos, featuring girls who appear to be as young as 12, and more than 20 "home videos" of Volar with underage black girls.

Still, Volar was not taken into custody. No sex crimes case was entered into the Wisconsin court system.

Twelve days later, Volar was dead.

Kenosha police declined to comment for this story. Graveley, the district attorney, said his office assigned a sex crimes prosecutor to the case who was working to determine the identities and ages of the victims involved.

"In many and most of the cases, we didn't know the age," he said. "So we literally did not know whether we had misdemeanors or felony."

Although police hadn't tracked down all the other girls in Volar's videos, they did describe most of them in their reports as "mid teens" or "early teens." Investigators wrote that one appeared to be 13 or 14. Another, they thought might be as young as 12.

Rachel Monaco-Wilcox, who runs a legal clinic for human-trafficking victims in Wisconsin, said police and prosecutors who are unfamiliar with these issues regularly fail to recognize that under federal law, there is no such thing as a "child prostitute." Children, especially children of color, are still seen as willing participants in the sale of sex, and research shows black girls are routinely perceived as older and more sexually mature than their white peers.

"[Investigators] think, 'My 14-year-old daughter would never do that, so there's no excuse,' " Monaco-Wilcox said. " 'They knew what they were doing. They put themselves out there.' "

In the case against Volar, the lead investigator described the 15-year-old who ran from his house as "prostituting herself out" in his report.

After Volar was killed, homicide detectives quickly learned more about his activities. On the day of his death, police received a call from TCF Bank, where most of Volar's money - $800,000 in assets - was housed. Prosecutors would later say that Volar's funds came from legal trading in cryptocurrency. The bank, police reports show, suspected something else was going on.

A bank official called the police to flag that between November 2017 and May 2018, Volar had almost $1.5 million in transfers - in a pattern of activity the bank associated with human trafficking.

Confused, the detective who took the call asked whether someone from his department had called the bank to request this information.

"No," the bank official said. He was just making a "cold call," according to the police report. He had no idea Volar was dead.

Days later, the detective opened Volar's file. The videos taken from his home had been edited into still images, showing his victims' faces.

The detective started flipping through the pictures, searching for one face in particular. And then, he found it.

There was Chrystul Kizer, her arms wrapped around her body, smiling at the camera.

'He was a grown-up'

Sixteen months later, Chrystul was looking into another camera, this time from inside the Kenosha County jail. A phone was pressed to her ear.

"Hey," she said, and so began each call to a reporter through the jail's video visit system. In more than five hours of calls, Chrystul shared her story of what happened with Randy Volar, which began not in Wisconsin, but in Gary, Ind., where she was born.

Her mom, Devore Taylor, was 16 when she had Chrystul. Taylor took jobs at fast-food joints to support her daughter, a burgeoning artist. Chrystul was delighted by watching cartoons and even more entertained by drawing worlds of her own.

For junior high, she earned a spot in Gary's performing arts academy. She chose orchestra as her specialty. Taylor couldn't afford a violin - by then, she had three more children and a boyfriend to support - so she put $100 down and paid a little at a time. While Taylor took classes at night, Chrystul started practicing at all hours, trying to learn Beethoven and "Silent Night."

Even now, Chrystul describes herself by talking about her music. "I'm a violinist," she said. "Some instruments, like the guitar, my hand is too little for the board. So I like instruments that I can play."

But while she learned the violin, Chrystul's childhood started to unravel as her mom's boyfriend turned more and more violent. Taylor never thought he would hurt her kids. Chrystul remembered differently. "We would get in trouble and he would take it too far, and do extra," she said.

Chrystul learned to guide her brother and two sisters into their bedroom, close the door and wait for her mom to say she could call the police.

"They would just take him and tell him to leave," Chrystul recalled. "But he would always come back."

At the end of 2015, Taylor and the kids left almost all of their belongings in Indiana and moved to Milwaukee. They stayed at a Salvation Army shelter for months before they found an apartment.

While Taylor was working at Denny's, her son started stealing cars. Chrystul started skipping school and hanging with Delane Nelson, who was three years older than her.

Soon, Chrystul and Nelson were physically fighting. Once, a witness saw Nelsonholding Chrystul in a headlock and striking her "with a stick more than 10 times while dragging her through the parking lot." Nelson - who did not respond to requests for comment - pleaded guilty to a charge of battery. Chrystul stayed with him.

In the fall of 2016, she met someone who told her she deserved better: Randy Volar.

Chrystul first said she met Volar at a bus stop. Later, she confessed she met him after he responded to an advertisement she had posted on Backpage.com. She needed money for snacks and school notebooks, she said, and a girl she knew showed her how to use the site. Volar was the first to respond.

She was 16, but she told him she was 19.

"At first, I was nervous," she said. "And then I told him okay."

Before long, she was seeing Volar every other week. She said he was always complimenting her brown eyes, her colorful wigs, her 104-pound body. He took her on dates and let her order steak. He bought her a heart-shaped locket, got her a phone and let her drive his cars. She didn't need to post on Backpage.com again; he took her shopping and gave her cash she could share with her sisters, sometimes $500 at a time. She made excuses to Nelson and her mom about where the gifts were coming from.

She knew what Volar expected in return. But she didn't think it was wrong.

"He was the only friend that I actually had," she said.

She is sure Volar knew her real age because in the summer of 2017, he invited her to his house to celebrate her 17th birthday.

"He had bought me cupcakes," Chrystul recalled. "And he had gave me this new drug I had never heard about called acid. It made me feel weird."

A few weeks later, Chrystul was arrested. Milwaukee police said she was driving a car that her brother had reportedlystolenwhen they tried to pull her over. According to police, she sped away, then ran. She was charged with fleeing an officer. In Wisconsin, 17-year-olds are charged as adults.

After 55 days in jail, her bond was reduced to $400. Volar paid it.

Chrystul said he made clear what specific sex acts he wanted in return.

"I told him that I never wanted to do that," Chrystul said. "He said that I had to owe him that."

She began to try to cut Volar out of her life. To her mother's dismay, she had moved in with Nelson. Chrystul said she told Volar she wanted to get serious with Nelson, so she couldn't see him anymore.

"He had started to talk violent and stuff," she said. "I was going to stop talking to him, and he said if I did that he was going to kill me."

She never confided in anyone. She didn't call the police.

"They didn't help my mom," she explained.

Chrystul said she didn't know about the other girls, Volar's arrest or the videos confiscated by police. She said she didn't know Volar filmed her.

Eventually, those videos and the sex crimes file on Volar would be shared with Chrystul's lawyer, who came to believe Volar's involvement in sex trafficking went beyond just buying sex. Volar used cryptocurrency and anonymous browsers to access the dark web - tools popular with distributors of child pornography.

In the videos Volar made, Chrystul's lawyer told the judge, he describes himself as an "escort trainer." He instructs one girl, the lawyer said, on "what she could do to keep body parts of hers in working order to be a better prostitute." In another video, Volar tells a girl, "Do you want to post to Kenosha/Racine and see if anybody calls you and I'll give you a ride."

Only after multiple interviews with The Post did Chrystul describe, quietly, what that meant. Volar, she said, sold her through Backpage.com to other people. She said he would post ads, then drive her to hotels in Milwaukee, where men his age or older would spend 30 minutes with her. She gave Volar the money she earned. Sometimes, she said, Volar would arrange for her to meet more than one man in a day.

"He told me to get the money first and then to text him once I was finished," she said.

Once talkative and smiling during interviews, Chrystul grew more and more upset as she spoke. To most questions, she answered: "I don't know." She did not know the hotel names or how much the men paid. She did not know when it started or how many times it happened. She said she did not know how it made her feel.

But she did know why she kept doing it.

"Because he was a grown-up, and I wasn't," she said. "So I listened."

In May 2018, Chrystul's boyfriend started to grow suspicious. Nelson told Chrystul, and later the police, that he thought someone might be following her. He bought her a .380 pistol and taught her to shoot it in his backyard. He told her to carry it everywhere.

On June 4, she appeared in Milwaukee court to plead guilty to the fleeing charge she had picked up nearly a year earlier. She said Nelson went with her, and by the afternoon, they were fighting. Worried he would hit her again, Chrystul said she texted Volar to ask whether she could come over.

At 8:42 p.m., an Uber picked her up. The pistol, she said, was in her purse.

"I had went into the house. ... He had ordered some pizza. We were smoking, and he asked me if I wanted to drink any liquor. And then he had gave me this drug. I don't know what it's called. And after that, we started to watch movies. ... And then, the drug, it made me feel weird or whatever."

She said Volar came to sit next to her. "He started to touch my leg and then like I had jumped and tell him that I didn't want to do that."

"I just thought that I didn't want to do that stuff anymore because I was trying to change," she said.

Volar, Chrystul recalled, told her what she owed him.

"I tried to get up, to get away from him but I had tripped, and I fell on the floor, and he had got on top of me," she said. "And he was trying to like, rip my pants off, my jeans that I had on. ... I was, like, wiggling. Cause once me and [Nelson] had fought, he had tried to pin me down, but I'll wiggle to get loose."

She doesn't remember going to get the pistol. She does remember the sound it made.

"Like a pop. A high pop," she said. "I started to panic."

This was a different story than what she initiallytold detectives. On the day she was arrested, Chrystul said she didn't know Volar. Then she said she saw another woman shoot him. Months later, she would tell police that Nelson had been the one to kill him.

But eventually, during her first interview with detectives, she confessed. She told them she was tired of Volar touching her.

"Kizer said that she watches the show Criminal Minds, and she decided to make a fire," an account of the interview states. "Kizer said she poured red liquor everywhere ... grabbed tissue or toilet paper and started the fire."

Chrystul said she doesn't remember the fire. She said Volar was planning to give her a laptop and a new car for her 18th birthday, and that's why she took them. She said she lied to detectives at first because she was scared.

But she knows a jury will examine those actions when they ask the central question about what happened between Chrystul and Volar: Who was the real victim?

To Chrystul, the answer is clear.

"Both of us," she said. "Because of the stuff that he was doing to me. And, that he should have never died."

'The capacity to consent'

While Chrystul was sitting in jail this fall, someone with a story much like hers was walking free.

Cyntoia Brown was 16 years old when the man she believed to be her boyfriend started selling her for sex. First, just to his friends. Then, she told herself, she was just "pretending to be a prostitute." Before long, she spent each day hoping that if she could just bring in enough money, he'd let her stop. She never called it "sex trafficking."

"I thought it was okay for me to be with adult men," Brown, now 31, said in an interview. "I didn't think I was being taken advantage of. ... It never crossed my mind that I didn't have the capacity to consent."

On a summer night in 2004, a 43-year-old picked up Brown at a Sonic Drive-In and took her to his Nashville home. A .40-caliber handgun was in her purse. Prosecutors argued that she wanted to rob him. Brown said she feared for her life when she shot him in the back of the head. She stole two guns and cash from his home and fled in his truck.

She was sentenced to life in prison. But 13 years later, in the midst of 2017's #MeToo movement, Brown's story went viral. Rihanna, Kim Kardashian and thousands of others spread the word about the campaign to #FreeCyntoiaBrown.

By then, there was a growing movement against sex trafficking. Advocates armed with research on brain development, racial bias and the impacts of trauma were working to educate police officers, judges and prosecutors, including Preston Shipp, one of the attorneys who argued that Brown should spend her life in prison. Shipp was so moved by what he learned, he testified on Brown's behalf at her clemency hearing. Four months ago, she was released.

But other child-trafficking victims involved in violent crimes are still behind bars. Some have been there for decades. For many, the abuse they experienced was never brought up in court, or it was dismissed as irrelevant, making it impossible to know the number of cases that exist across the country.

They were sex trafficked as teenagers. They were involved in a murder. Some have spent decades in prison. Some are walking free.

Michigan (1990)

Current status: 45, still imprisoned

Ohio (2013)

Florida (1994)

Current status: 40, still imprisoned

Louisiana (1994)

California (1994)

Tennessee (2004)

New York (1998)

At least 35 states have passed affirmative defense laws, which allow victims to try to prove in court that their crime occurred because of the abuse they experienced. Most of those laws only apply to prostitution charges; some can be used for other crimes traffickers often force their victims to commit, such as truancy, theft and drug possession.

But in a few states, including Wisconsin, the affirmative defense law is broad. It doesn't specify which crimes the defense can be used for.

"A victim of a violation of [trafficking] has an affirmative defense," the Wisconsin law states, "for any offense committed as a direct result of the violation of [trafficking] without regard to whether anyone was prosecuted or convicted for the violation of [trafficking]."

In the years since the law was enacted in 2008, it has been used by lawyers seeking plea deals for clients charged with prostitution. But neither side in Chrystul's case could find an instance in which the law was used as a defense in court.

With no other cases to serve as precedent, and no further clarification written in the law, the judge in Chrystul's case would be the first to decide which crimes the affirmative defense can apply to - and whether that includes violent crimes.

Siding with Chrystul could open a door for other trafficking victims prosecuted in Wisconsin and fuel the creation of new affirmative defense laws across the country. And it would give Chrystul's lawyers the chance to try to convince a jury that even if she killed a man, she deserved to go free.

'The true story'

Judge David P. Wilk peered down from his bench at Chrystul. He'd seen her in court eight times now. Her mother and the activists sat behind the Volar family: aunts, a grandmother, Volar's mother Diana and, seated closest to Chrystul, his father Randall P. Volar Jr. The family declined to be interviewed for this story.

"The true story has yet to be told," Volar's father said in a statement. "And when the truth comes out, I hope people's perceptions of my son will change. My son was a good man, loved by his family and respected for his kindness and intelligence. We all miss him dearly and would do anything to turn back the hands of time so we could be with him. What happened is a tragedy for both families the Kizers and the Volars."

At the hearing, prosecutors once again argued that the true story was a calculated attack that ended a man's life and endangered the lives of his neighbors. "We know," Graveley told the judge, "that the preplanning predates the incident."

His court filings show that a few days before the crime, Chrystul sent a Facebook message to a friend saying, "I'm finna get a bmw." Her friend asked when. Chrystul replied, "Soon."

"And then," Graveley said, "there is a real-time communication."

The night of the crime, according to prosecutors, Chrystul was texting two people about where the key to "the car" was and that she had learned how to start it.

At 10:42 p.m., she texted: "When u want me to do it bae."

At 11:09 p.m.: "Nun but I'm finna do it rn [right now] doe."

11:13 p.m.: "I'm finna do it."

12:03 a.m.: "Just order some pizza some ima wait...It's just gone splatter every where I looked it up on google and it's a pillow ima wait until she asleep."

As Graveley spoke about the texts, Volar's mother began to cry. His father set his head in his hands. Chrystul's expressions changed by the minute: a blank stare, a forehead scrunched, her eyes wide and staring at her lawyer, Carl Johnson, waiting for him to interject.

Compared with Graveley's booming confidence, Johnson sounded quiet and cautious. He took long pauses to review his notes. Chrystul's case was one of more than a dozen he was overseeing.

Johnson didn't address whether the crime was premeditated. The broadness of the affirmative defense law, he argued, means Chrystul has a complete defense to the charges.

If the judge agreed with him, it would be up to a jury to decide whether her crimes were a "direct result" of being trafficked.

If Wilk said the affirmative defense didn't apply to cases like hers, Johnson would have to come up with an entirely new strategy for defending Chrystul.

She sat beside him, still pulling at her rosary while trying to read his notes.

"The court," Wilk said after 40 minutes, "is not going to rule today. The court is going to come back in approximately 30 days."

Chrystul stood and turned toward her mom. Then she shuffled across the room, out of the courthouse and back to her cell.

'Little kids?'

Two hours later, Chrystul's mom thanked the activists who drove her to and from Kenosha and climbed out of their car. Taylor, 36, didn't like asking for their help, but her truck was broken, and court was the only time she could see Chrystul in person.

Inside her Milwaukee apartment, Taylor looked at the notes she had taken that day. At the bottom of the page, she'd written, "Affirmative defense. Find statute."

For a year and a half she'd been going over it all in her head. Why hadn't she stopped Chrystul from going to live with her boyfriend? Why hadn't she asked more questions about those new clothes? She reminded herself that she had three other kids, worked long hours and moved to Milwaukee to survive. Only sometimes did it make her feel any better.

Here, Chrystul was everywhere. Photos of her taped to the walls. Her violin in storage, gathering dust. A box of belongings from the women's prison - where Chrystul served nine months this year for her fleeing charge - stashed where Taylor wouldn't have to look at it.

When Chrystul finished that sentence in September, she was transferred back to the county jail in Kenosha to await her murder trial. She couldn't bring her possessions with her, so they were sent to Taylor.

That evening, for the first time, Taylor started to go through the box. Beneath drawings and coloring books, she found a leather-bound Bible. Inside was a list titled, "My goals."

"Finish school," Chrystul had written. "Gain 20 to 25 pounds." "Get out and do better!!"

Beneath the Bible, Taylor found a large yellow envelope. Inside was a stack of documents and a letter from Chrystul's lawyers.

"Dear Ms. Kizer, Please find enclosed the materials you requested," it said. "They include the police reports from the investigation into Mr. Volar."

Taylor flipped to the next page. And the next. Here was the search warrant for Volar's property, a list of all the computers and DVDs and flash drives taken from his house.

"But I looked up his arrest records," Taylor said. "And this was not on there?"

She started to read what was on one flash drive. After a moment, she had to wipe tears from her eyes so she could see the page. She started to read out loud, her voice cracking.

"Numerous home videos recorded by the suspect of him having sex with numerous females. ... Most appear to be in their teenage years from 14 to 17 years old."

She kept flipping, and then she was shouting.

"Twelve? Twelve? Come on, man, 12 years old? Little kids? They ain't even in their teens?"

She turned to another page, listing the child sexual assault charges against Volar.

"So why," she yelled, "are we here?"

There were dozens more pages, and on one, she saw a copy of a photo. It was a still image from a video.

Taylor started flipping through the pictures, searching for one face in particular. And then, she found it.

There was her daughter, her arms wrapped around her body, smiling at the camera.

'Jail Land'

In December, Chrystul went before the judge again.

"The court," Wilk announced, "is satisfied that a blanket affirmative defense to all acts leads to an absurd result."

He decided: Chrystul did not have access to the affirmative defense law for trafficking victims. In his view, neither would other trafficking victims charged with violent crimes.

Johnson plans to appeal the ruling - a process that could delay the jury trial for months. Chrystul returned to jail, where she is still trying to figure out how to pass the time.

Sleeping gives her night terrors. Seeing a counselor makes her agitated. Calling home only works when her mom can pay to answer the calls.

Drawing, Chrystul says, is what makes her feel like herself. This fall, she spent weeks working on a board game of her own creation with a colorful, winding road like the one in Candy Land. She called it "Jail Land."

With two friends, Chrystul molded and colored dried toothpaste into game pieces shaped like a book, a pack of cigarettes and a bag of money. As the pieces moved down the road, they met opportunities and obstacles: church, Alcoholics Anonymous, a padded cell. Chance cards let a player jump forward or sent them to "the hole."

Players who made it to the end of the road went free. Each time Chrystul played the game, she made sure to reach the end.

For weeks, she kept working to make the board more colorful, adding more pieces and trying to find other inmates who wanted to play. And then, she was moved to another unit. Almost all of her belongings she said, were thrown away or left behind.

She hasn't bothered drawing the game again.

Instead, she uses her small supply of paper to send letters to her supporters, including a 29-year-old white man who read about her case and wrote to her from another Wisconsin prison. Their letters have become so frequent that Chrystul has started calling him her boyfriend. She knows he is serving time for the charge he pleaded guilty to in 2011: child enticement.

He told her the crime was the result of a misunderstanding. He is scheduled to be released next year, but will remain a registered sex offender. Chrystul says he is going to marry her.

Susan Berger, in Kenosha, Wis., contributed to this report

About this story

Editing by Lynda Robinson. Photos by Sarah L. Voisin. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Video editing by Amber Ferguson. Copy editing by Whitney Juckno. Design and development by Brandon Ferrill.

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He was sexually abusing underage girls. Then, police said, one of them killed him.

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Now Chrystul Kizer, who was 16 when she met Randy Volar, is accused of murdering her alleged sex trafficker. She faces life in prison. By Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Metal cuffs strained against her ankles as she shuffled down the courthouse hallway.

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After winning the Heisman Trophy by a historic margin Saturday, record-breaking LSU quarterback Joe Burrow used his speech to tearfully remember others who are less fortunate, specifically highlighting the problem of hunger in his hometown of Athens, Ohio. The viral speech sent ripples nationally, sparking an impromptu fundraiser that left the Athens County Food Pantry with nearly $333,000 in donations after just two days. “Coming from southeast Ohio, it’s a very impoverished area,” the 23-year-old Burrow said on the stage, wiping away tears after winning the award. “The poverty rate is almost two times the national average, and there’s so many people there that don’t have a lot. I’m up here for all those kids in Athens and in Athens County that go home to not a lot of food on the table, hungry after school,” he added, telling those kids, “and you guys can be up here, too.”

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Joe Burrow's big moment was unscripted, and it came straight from the heart.

After winning the Heisman Trophy by a historic margin Saturday, LSU's record-breaking quarterback used his acceptance speech to tearfully remember those who are less fortunate, specifically highlighting the problem of hunger in his hometown of Athens, Ohio. That kind gesture went viral and sent ripples nationally, sparking an impromptu fundraiser that left the Athens County Food Pantry with nearly $435,000 in donations by Wednesday morning.

"Coming from southeast Ohio, it's a very impoverished area," the 23-year-old Burrow said on the stage in New York, wiping away tears after he won the award. "The poverty rate is almost two times the national average, and there's so many people there that don't have a lot.

"I'm up here for all those kids in Athens and in Athens County that go home to not a lot of food on the table, hungry after school," he added, telling those kids, "and you guys can be up here, too."

It was a moment that was pure and unscripted, his father, Jimmy Burrow, told The Washington Post.

"About an hour before we were to go to where the presentation was being held, I asked my wife, 'You know, we haven't even really talked to Joe about whether he's prepared any words or anything.' So I went down to his room, and he was sitting at his desk, making a few notes on a very small piece of paper, and I asked, 'Hey, are you putting down some thoughts?' and he said yes," Jimmy Burrow recalled.

LSU quarterback Joe Burrow wins Heisman Trophy by historic voting margin

"I didn't have any idea what he was going to say, and to see him up there speaking from the heart, you knew that was probably nothing he had written down. Afterward, I said, 'Joe, you really didn't use anything you put on that piece of paper, did you?' And he said, 'No, not really.' That's the beauty of it. It was genuine, not prepared and not planned. He really did speak from his heart."

The speech spurred Will Drabold, an Athens resident, to create a fundraising page the next day on Facebook for the Athens County Food Pantry.

"I started this because, like everyone else from Athens, I cried during Joey's speech and felt like there had to be a way to harness that," Drabold, a graduate of Athens' Ohio University, wrote.

Contributions poured in from around the country, particularly Ohio and Louisiana, where Burrow has led No. 1 LSU into a Dec. 28 College Football Playoff semifinal game against No. 4 Oklahoma. With CNN planning a visit to Athens and NBC interested as well, his hometown food pantry is suddenly in the national spotlight. "We're still trying to come to terms with the reality that this isn't a dream," Karin Bright, the food pantry president, told NPR. "It's amazing."

Burrow, who grew up in Athens, initially played at Ohio State but transferred to LSU in 2018 after graduating in three years with a degree in consumer and family financial services. At LSU, he has become a beloved star and the likely No. 1 pick in next spring's NFL draft, as popular in the Bayou State as he is in Ohio. "It's like Joe has become everybody's next door neighbor," Bright said, "the kid that everybody knows."

Not surprisingly, people from Louisiana were eager to donate, too, with one caller, Bright said, telling her daughter, "Thank you for Joe, from Louisiana." Jimmy Burrow noted that a reciprocal food drive in Baton Rouge is in the offing, with LSU keeping a watchful eye to ensure no NCAA rules are violated.

"The power of words spoken by the right people can make a big difference," Jimmy Burrow said. "The good thing is that people saw how sincere Joe was in his thoughts about Athens County and southeast Ohio. It struck a nerve. Initially, I think it started out that just people around here and Louisiana [were contributing] and now people from all over the country are donating.

"It's great that Joe had that kind of influence on a lot of people and he's glad that he can make a difference in some people's lives."

From Ohio State to LSU, Joe Burrow has made the most of college football - and of college

Athens is the poorest county in Ohio, with an Ohio Development Services Agency report indicating that more than 30 percent of its population lives in poverty - a rate nearly three times the national average. The local pantry served more than 2,100 families last year. Athens Mayor Steve Patterson told the (Baton Rouge) Advocate that the town, which was founded in 1798, has seen its industrial base in the timber, oil extraction and coal businesses wither away. The top employer is Ohio University, with an enrollment of 23,000 students across all levels, followed by the hospital and Walmart.

"Hunger is a real problem in our county. We don't have much in the way of industry. So economically, we struggle and we're rural, so transportation makes it very difficult for people to get jobs and be able to get there," Bright told NPR. "People are struggling, and they do their best. But it's really, really challenging here."

Burrow's speech helped ease the humiliation of asking for help. Drabold told NPR that a student in his wife's elementary school special education class had spoken proudly about using the food pantry Burrow's remarks. "As we all know, sometimes people are embarrassed that they have to utilize something like a food pantry," Jimmy Burrow said, "so I guess it's okay now that Joe Burrow talked about it."

Jimmy Burrow played at Nebraska, as well as in the NFL with the Green Bay Packers and in the Canadian Football League. He was a longtime assistant coach at Nebraska, Washington State, Iowa State, North Dakota State and Ohio, where he coached for 14 seasons until he retired last year. He will be increasingly involved as his son prepares to turn pro and has watched as Athens proudly turns out in LSU colors on game days. This episode figures to increase the community's connection to Burrow.

"For him to bring that up ... this is a man who has not forgotten where he came from, and I don't think he ever will," Bright told NPR. "I think he will always be grateful for the support of this community. And I think he wants to let the world know that it's a community that, with some help, these kids can go further."

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Heisman winner Joe Burrow spoke 'from the heart' about hunger in his hometown. Now money is pouring in.

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Joe Burrow's big moment was unscripted, and it came straight from the heart. After winning the Heisman Trophy by a historic margin Saturday, LSU's record-breaking quarterback used his acceptance speech to tearfully remember those who are less fortunate, specifically highlighting the problem of hunger in his hometown of Athens, Ohio.

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LeBron James Jr., known as “Bronny” to his family, friends and 3.9 million Instagram followers — wears No. 0 rather than his dad’s No. 23, but the genetic flashes peek through on the court. He tosses no-look passes, throws down alley-oop dunks and shifts gears in transition with a familiar ease for Los Angeles' Sierra Canyon School. High school basketball hype runs in the family. Before his father, LeBron James, was the face of the NBA, he appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in February 2002 as a junior at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, and played a nationally televised game on ESPN2. Even as a teenager, LeBron was the biggest story in basketball. Nearly two decades later, in an age when social media turns teenage phenoms into celebrities, LeBron’s eldest son is riding the prep hype machine to new levels.

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Thanks to intense interest in 15-year-old freshman Bronny James, the eldest son of LeBron James, Sierra Canyon will appear 15 times this season on various ESPN networks. (Allison Zaucha/For The Washington Post)

LOS ANGELES - LeBron James Jr. stands 6-foot-2, a wispy mini-me next to his hulking, 6-8 father - at least at 15 years old. The high school freshman - known as "Bronny" to his family, friends and 3.7 million Instagram followers - wears No. 0 rather than his dad's No. 23, but the genetic flashes peek through on the court. The guard tosses no-look passes, throws down alley-oop dunks and shifts gears in transition with a familiar ease for Sierra Canyon School in this city's Chatsworth neighborhood.

High school basketball hype runs in the family. Before LeBron James was the face of the NBA, he appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in February 2002 as a junior at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, and played a nationally televised game on ESPN2 as a senior that, according to one executive involved in the broadcast, was at the time the network's most-watched live sporting event ever. Even as a teenager, LeBron was the biggest story in basketball: He drew comparisons to Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, his games regularly sold out college gyms and his team crisscrossed the country, logging 9,000 miles of travel in one season.

Nearly two decades later, in an age when social media turns teenage phenoms into celebrities, LeBron's eldest son is riding the prep hype machine to new levels.

At Sierra Canyon's home opener Tuesday, at least 10 video cameras shadowed Bronny's every move during warmups. The school sold out of roughly 1,000 tickets in 32 minutes through a private online presale, and the media contingent on hand included basketball mix-tape makers, national newspaper writers, local television reporters and multiple ESPN personalities.

The Sierra Canyon Trailblazers - who also feature the son of James's former Miami Heat teammate Dwyane Wade - have landed an unprecedented 15 appearances this season on ESPN's television networks and streaming service. A YouTube highlight reel of a recent Sierra Canyon victory has received more than 2 million views, and star running back Todd Gurley II of the Los Angeles Rams chose to sit courtside for Bronny and Co. this week rather than watch the Los Angeles Clippers play at Staples Center.

"A lot of the high school guys are more famous than the NBA players," said Cassy Athena, a well-known sports photographer whose photo of Bronny drew more than 2.5 million likes on LeBron's Instagram account. "If I post a picture of Bronny, a lot of times it will get more traction than the NBA players."

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It's My Job to pass along to Blueprint so it allows him(his brother and sister) to Rumble Young Man/Woman Rumble! Heir to the Throne. #LikeFatherLikeSon🤲🏾#ThekidsfromAKRON🤴🏾#JamesGang👑 @bronny

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While Bronny is not yet his team's best player and his professional future remains uncertain, the amount of hype he is receiving has solidified Sierra Canyon, an ambitious college preparatory school, as the center of the prep basketball universe and launched a second-generation journey his father hopes will lead to the NBA.

"It's My Job to pass along [the] Blueprint," LeBron James, the Los Angeles Lakers' 34-year-old star forward, wrote alongside a side-by-side photo of him and his son dunking. "Heir to the throne." He added the hashtag "#LikeFatherLikeSon."

LeBron James heard the doubters. The 'Washed King' has responded with MVP-level play.

The Bronny blueprint was forged during his father's rise to stardom, which included multiple controversies as he grappled with being a professional-quality player in an amateur environment.

James was suspended by the Ohio High School Athletic Association for accepting throwback jerseys from a clothing store, and his mother, Gloria, was heavily criticized for obtaining a loan to buy him a Hummer for his 18th birthday. Before he became the top pick in the 2003 NBA draft, James considered trying to enter the 2002 draft in hopes of jump-starting his professional career and inking endorsement deals.

If LeBron's arrival was a shock to the systems that governed the sport locally and promoted it nationally two decades ago, Bronny's reveals how fast those systems have evolved and the far-reaching benefits of his father's wealth, fame and influence.

Bronny takes the court in a Nike jersey and sneakers, just like his father, who in 2015 signed a lifetime endorsement deal with the sports apparel maker reported to be worth more than $1 billion. Bronny's wood-paneled locker is adjacent to that of teammate Zaire Wade, the 17-year-old son of LeBron's former teammate and close friend Dwayne Wade. A few weeks before LeBron and the Lakers went to China for a preseason game, Bronny and Sierra Canyon also visited for a team-bonding trip.

The Trailblazers have collected top players from Georgia, Florida and California to form a high school version of the Miami Heat superteam that starred James and Wade. Sierra Canyon seeks to replicate the Duke or Stanford experience on the high school level, and its commitment to its athletic teams is staggering. The basketball staff has six assistant coaches, on par with an NBA team. The players receive pregame scouting reports and video breakdowns, and they participated in a preseason media day.

Because of its independent status, Sierra Canyon is free to aggressively schedule out-of-state matchups, including a Dec. 14 game against LeBron's alma mater in Ohio. The Trailblazers will travel to Texas, Massachusetts, Nevada, Arizona and New Jersey this season while also competing in Minnesota in a made-for-television event created by the Paragon Marketing Group, an intermediary between ESPN and high schools.

"A lot of people remember seeing these kids as 2-year-olds at press conferences with their dads," said Rashid Ghazi, an executive at Paragon, which has placed high school games on ESPN for 16 years. "Fans have grown up with these kids. LeBron is so active on social media with his family that a lot of people feel invested in Bronny."

LeBron came of age before YouTube and social media, so tracking down his early high school highlights is difficult. By contrast, 13 of Sierra Canyon's 15 ESPN appearances this season will come on ESPN3, a streaming platform popular among younger audiences and mobile viewers. Paragon supplements ESPN's coverage by posting clips in real time and sending highlights directly to athletes for use on their own accounts. Among live game coverage, highlight plays, YouTube replays and interviews, online broadcasts regularly log more than 1 million engagements.

ESPN executive Dan Margulis said the network was seeking to balance widespread interest in Bronny with the fact that he is still an untested freshman. He insisted that the network isn't looking ahead to when Bronny might emerge as a major prospect and, potentially, a candidate to bypass college and jump straight to the NBA if anticipated changes to the draft rules are made.

"If Bronny becomes his dad, we'll be all over it just like if any kid was that good," Margulis said. "Bronny seems to be incredibly poised with all the pressure that's on him. I don't want to be the person who adds to it. This [year's coverage] is an experiment."

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The digital interest in the team is matched in person: A recent game in Dallas had more than 10,000 pack American Airlines Center, home of the NBA's Mavericks. Sierra Canyon will host future games at nearby Cal State Northridge to accommodate larger crowds. The school employed a seven-man private security team to complement four Los Angeles Police Department officers for its first on-campus game. Bronny is shuttled to and from school by a driver, and guards are close by before and after games.

Nevertheless, school administrators describe Bronny, as one put it, as a "yes, sir/no, sir kid" who is "extremely mature for his age" and who understands that he is still "the rookie" on a team that has two seniors who are top-10 national recruits.

"Bronny doesn't really want the praise," the team's coach, Andre Chevalier, said. "He just keeps his head down. He's not looking into the crowd. He's not trying to sign autographs. It's wonderful."

LeBron has made a natural transition from hyped prospect to hype man, fueling much of the interest in his son by attending his AAU games, sharing clips on social media and even using the Lakers' media day to campaign for Sierra Canyon to play at Staples Center.

But there are two firm boundaries: LeBron has barred Bronny from doing media interviews during his freshman year, and he has taken a hands-off approach with Sierra Canyon's coaches. LeBron rushed to the locker room to watch Bronny's highlights after the Lakers' road win over the Denver Nuggets on Tuesday, but he resists the temptation to bombard Chevalier with suggestions or requests. The same is true of Wade, who has attended games with his wife, actress Gabrielle Union.

"They want me to make my own judgments," said Chevalier, who has coached high school basketball for more than 20 years and guided the Trailblazers to state titles in 2018 and 2019. "They did their research before they came here. They watch from a distance."

At a high school of immigrants just outside Washington, soccer is a break from hectic reality

It is not lost on Sierra Canyon administrators that the James family could have sent Bronny to any high school. At the same time, Sierra Canyon was perhaps uniquely qualified to land him. LeBron and Sierra Canyon are philosophically aligned: His "Strive for Greatness" catchphrase nearly mirrors the school's Latin motto "Excellentia propter se," which translates to "excellence is its own reward."

The high school has deep celebrity ties: Stevie Wonder and Will Smith played integral roles in its founding in 2005, while Kylie and Kendall Jenner are among its famous alumni. Sierra Canyon's teams have captured state titles in numerous sports, including football and girls' volleyball. In recent years, the basketball team has featured now-Sacramento Kings forward Marvin Bagley III and the sons of former NBA stars Scottie Pippen and Kenyon Martin.

While LeBron attended a private Catholic high school with a tradition of academic and athletic success, Sierra Canyon bears all the hallmarks of a top prep school. The sprawling campus boasts mountain vistas, an athletic complex with well-maintained fields and an esports game room packed with high-end computers. Tuition runs $40,000 per year, the average class size is 15 students, and 98 percent of graduating seniors go on to four-year universities.

The school aims to compete academically with blue bloods such as Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. and Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, but it cultivates a more relaxed environment. The 550 students abide by an informal dress code and attend classes near middle-class Chatsworth rather than in ritzy Beverly Hills or Bel-Air. An elaborate busing system brings in teens from all corners of Los Angeles, and students of color make up 43 percent of the student body.

"We're elite without being elitist," said Jim Skrumbis, the head of school. "That appeals to a lot of families."

Sierra Canyon has benefited from good fortune, too. Without a recent California rule change that allows smaller schools to play against larger schools if they demonstrate "competitive equity" by fielding winning teams, the Trailblazers would have been stuck in a lower classification group. That would have made it more difficult to schedule highly ranked opponents and to attract blue chip players.

The basketball program's all-consuming intensity and wall-to-wall media coverage might seem like overkill or exploitation to outsiders. School officials assert that visibility and top-flight competition are of paramount importance to families who expect their children to earn Division I college scholarships and, hopefully, play in the NBA. B.J. Boston, a senior forward, said he relocated from Atlanta in hopes of preparing himself for the University of Kentucky and a professional career that could improve his family's long-term financial security.

"Does everybody want this? Not really," Athletic Director Rock Pillsbury said. "This group does. The parents want to give their kids the best chance to be successful, and these are really driven kids. We want to be the best in every single sport, the best in arts, the best in academics. The fun part is going for it."

The scope of the attention has sounded some alarms on campus. Skrumbis said he had "mixed feelings" about the basketball program's success because he "[doesn't] want the school to be defined in one way."

Pillsbury said that high-level prep sports "could be getting close" to media oversaturation. Steve Burnett, a Sierra Canyon counselor, wondered whether fans will soon be paying for team-specific high school cable packages.

The James family, however, is proceeding full speed ahead. With Bronny's launchpad in place, it can focus on its long-term goal: LeBron said his "greatest achievement in life" would be to play in the NBA with his son, which could happen as soon as 2023. He made that declaration last year via his "Uninterrupted" media company, which sent a six-man documentary film crew to film Bronny's game on Tuesday.

The surest way to realize that dream, LeBron seems to have concluded, is to put on a show.

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Like father, like son: Bronny James, LeBron's kid, is the biggest draw in high school hoops

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LOS ANGELES - LeBron James Jr. stands 6-foot-2, a wispy mini-me next to his hulking, 6-8 father - at least at 15 years old. The high school freshman - known as "Bronny" to his family, friends and 3.7 million Instagram followers - wears No. 0 rather than his dad's No.

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Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who emerged in recent weeks as an anti-impeachment Democrat, switched parties Thursday to join the GOP. “Very big announcement ... Jeff will be joining the Republican Party,” President Trump said Thursday, with Van Drew by his side in the Oval Office. The announcement is one of the White House’s first acts of political combat following Wednesday’s impeachment vote, with the intent of casting the Democratic Party as consumed with investigating the president and inhospitable to moderates. Van Drew, a 66-year-old dentist, was elected in 2018 to represent a congressional district that was won by Trump in 2016.Trump and administration officials, along with outside allies, have been wooing Van Drew for weeks, urging him to switch parties and assuring him that Trump and the GOP will support his reelection bid.

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Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who emerged in recent weeks as an anti-impeachment Democrat, switched parties Thursday to join the GOP, one day after he opposed both articles of impeachment against President Trump - and following weeks of courting by the president, allies of the president and administration officials.

"Very big announcement . . . Jeff will be joining the Republican Party," Trump said Thursday, with Van Drew by his side in the Oval Office.

The announcement is one of the White House's first acts of political combat following Wednesday's impeachment vote, with the intent of casting the Democratic Party as consumed with investigating the president and inhospitable to moderates.

Van Drew and Rep. Collin C. Peterson (Minn.) were the only Democrats to vote against both articles of impeachment - abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. On the second article, obstruction, those two and freshman Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) voted in opposition. Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is running for president, voted "present" on each article.

Van Drew, a 66-year-old dentist, was elected in 2018 to represent a congressional district that was won by Trump in 2016.

Trump and administration officials, along with outside allies, have been wooing Van Drew for weeks, urging him to switch parties and assuring him that Trump and the GOP will support his reelection bid.

"I believe that this is just a better fit for me," Van Drew said Thursday at the White House. "This is who I am," adding that Trump has his "undying support."

In response, Trump said he endorses Van Drew.

Despite Van Drew's claim of the GOP being "better fit," his voting record on major bills was almost uniformly with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), not with Trump. Aside from impeachment votes, a bipartisan budget deal, and a vote on holding two Trump cabinet officials in contempt of Congress, Van Drew broke with the Trump administration on every major vote of 2019.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, anti-impeachment Democrat, expected to switch parties after Trump meeting

Trump sealed Van Drew's commitment to a switch on Dec. 13 during a meeting in the White House residence, according to two top Republicans briefed on the meeting who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Van Drew arrived quietly at the White House that day and was greeted by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who ushered the lawmaker through the White House. At one point, Van Drew and Conway walked past two television reporters - but the reporters did not recognize the largely unknown New Jersey Democrat, the Republicans said, enabling Van Drew to proceed without notice.

Once at the residence, Van Drew, Conway and Trump talked at length about his political future and his concerns about the Democratic Party. Trump promised that he and the Republican Party would enthusiastically back Van Drew next year, including with events in his district, the Republicans added.

A rally in New Jersey with Van Drew could happen as soon as January, according to one of the Republicans.

Beyond Conway, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Bill Stepien, a former White House political director who is now a senior adviser to Trump's campaign, were key players in engaging Van Drew and his political orbit and encouraged him to seriously consider a switch. Both Christie and Stepien - a former aide to Christie - have deep roots in Garden State politics.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) welcomed Van Drew in brief remarks at his weekly news conference earlier Thursday.

"Republicans are a very big tent. We're excited to have Jeff Van Drew. We welcome anybody that believes this new Democrat socialist party has left them behind," McCarthy said.

McCarthy, Vice President Pence and Conway were with the president and Van Drew at the White House announcement.

Van Drew's polling numbers have reportedly been flagging in recent months, as some of the congressman's colleagues have pointed out. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, cited Van Drew's disappointing internal poll numbers as the reason behind his impending decision to leave the Democrats.

"What he's reacting to is public polling that shows he can't get renominated," Nadler said Sunday on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." "His electorate in his district is 24 percent to renominate him and 60 percent to nominate somebody else."

The Washington Post reported an internal survey last week that found 24 percent of respondents in Van Drew's district said they would support him in another run, and 58 percent said they would like a new Democratic candidate for his seat.

Already, one challenger has voiced her intent to oppose Van Drew as a Democrat. Brigid Callahan Harrison, a Montclair State University political science professor who plans to run for Van Drew's seat, slammed the sitting representative as a "traitor."

Amy Kennedy, a former public school teacher and the wife of former congressman Patrick J. Kennedy (D-R.I.), announced late Monday that she is considering running for the seat.

House Democrats have enough votes to impeach Trump, according to a Post analysis

Van Drew is the 10th member of Congress to switch parties in the past 20 years; with his move, two senators and eight members of the House have made the switch. Six were Democrats who headed to the GOP, three were Republicans who joined the Democratic caucus and one, Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), left the GOP and has declined to caucus with either party.

Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane and Katie Shepherd contributed to this report.

Impeachment: What you need to read
Updated January 29, 2020
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Trump welcomes Rep. Van Drew, an impeachment foe switching parties to join GOP

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Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who emerged in recent weeks as an anti-impeachment Democrat, switched parties Thursday to join the GOP, one day after he opposed both articles of impeachment against President Trump - and following weeks of courting by the president, allies of the president and administration officials.

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Deadly protests broke out in cities across India after the government approved the Citizenship Amendment Bill, or CAB, last week. The bill promises to fast-track citizenship for religious minorities — including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians — from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who arrived before 2015. But the exclusion of Muslims has raised concerns about the bill's constitutionality and the growing anti-Muslim rhetoric in India. ⁣
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have described CAB as a means of protecting vulnerable groups from persecution, but critics say the true target is India's minority Muslim population. ⁣
At least five people have been killed and more than a hundred injured during the demonstrations, according to police, and a large military presence has been deployed in Assam and Tripura, where the government shut down the internet.

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in photos: protesters rally against india's citizenship bill

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In photos: Protesters rally against India's citizenship bill

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Deadly protests have broken out in cities across India after the government officially approved the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill, or CAB.

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Hundreds of pro-impeachment demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square on Tuesday night, chanting, "Tell me who's above the law? Nobody is above the law!" Rallies sprang up across the US the night before a historic House vote on two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. If the articles pass in the House as expected, Trump will become only the third president in history to be impeached. Then, the Republican-led Senate will hold a trial to decide if Trump should be removed from office.

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pro-impeachment protests span the country ahead of historic vote - cnn

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Pro-impeachment protests span the country ahead of historic vote

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Hours before the House votes on whether to impeach President Donald Trump, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Times Square Tuesday night chanting "Tell me who's above the law? Nobody is above the law!"

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Temperatures are soaring in Australia as devastating wildfires continue to burn across New South Wales. The hottest ever average temperature was recorded on Tuesday in the country — hitting a record 105.6 Fahrenheit, beating the 2013 record of 104.5 Fahrenheit. Around 100 active fires are still burning across NSW, of which 54 are not yet contained, according to fire officials. "The driving force behind this is climate change," said Greg Mullins, former NSW Fire and Rescue commissioner. "In our decades of service, we've seen Australia become drier, hotter and extreme weather conditions far more severe."

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heat wave sees hottest day nationwide - cnn

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Australia swelters on its hottest day nationwide as wildfires rage

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Australia experienced its hottest day across the country Tuesday, with the national average temperature soaring as devastating wildfires continued to burn across New South Wales (NSW) state.

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President Donald Trump is now the third president in US history to be impeached after a House vote on Wednesday, joining Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. The Republican-led Senate will now hold a trial to decide if Trump should be removed from office. Unlike every other impeachment effort, Trump's party has a majority in the Senate. No president has ever been removed from office.

Here’s more on the US presidents who have been impeached:
▪️ Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868. The House passed 11 articles of impeachment against Johnson, a Democrat. They were mostly connected to violating the Tenure of Office Act, a law passed specifically to curb Johnson's ability to fire Cabinet officials appointed by Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, before his assassination.
▪️ Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998. The House passed two articles of impeachment against Clinton for perjury before a grand jury and obstructing lawsuits. The charges stemmed from Ken Starr's years-long independent counsel investigation that started as an inquiry into a land deal before Clinton was elected but morphed into a look at his affair in the White House.

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comparing the trump impeachment to johnson

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How Trump's impeachment stacks up, in four charts

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The impeachment of President Donald Trump is the third in US history and the fourth serious effort. No President has ever been removed from office and Trump will likely be no exception. The good news for Trump is every other President who faced impeachment squared off against a House and Senate held by the opposing party.

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Fifteen black medical students from Tulane University posed in front of former slave quarters at the Whitney Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana, in an effort to show how far African Americans have come. The students, who wore their white coats for the occasion, hope to put the photos in schools across the country to inspire future generations. Their message: "Yes, you can be smart. Yes, you can be successful ... and you can also do that while being unapologetically black and proud of where you come from and proud of where you are going,” said Sydney Labat, one of the students.

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a group of black tulane university medical students posed at a plantation to show how the past inspired their future - cnn

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A group of black Tulane University medical students posed at a plantation to show how the past inspired their future

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A picture is worth a thousand words and a group of black medical students at Tulane University are hoping their pictures speak volumes about how far they've come.

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Where do our old electronics end up? For a lot of them, the answer is Thailand, where workers break down the scrap with hammers and raw hands. Each year, 50 million tons of electronic waste are produced globally, according to the United Nations. But it is dirty and dangerous work to extract the tiny quantities of precious metals from castoff phones, computers and televisions. And the factories that process and burn the waste are producing toxic fumes that are threatening the health of local workers and their communities. “We can’t choose the air we breathe,” said Metta Maihala, a eucalyptus farmer. “Now there will be even more factories. We are all going to die a slow death.”

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Foreign workers sorting through piles of shredded e-waste on the premises of New Sky Metal in Thailand in September. Credit... Bryan Denton for The New York Times

KOH KHANUN, Thailand - Crouched on the ground in a dimly lit factory, the women picked through the discarded innards of the modern world: batteries, circuit boards and bundles of wires.

They broke down the scrap - known as e-waste - with hammers and raw hands. Men, some with faces wrapped in rags to repel the fumes, shoveled the refuse into a clanking machine that salvages usable metal.

As they toiled, smoke spewed over nearby villages and farms. Residents have no idea what is in the smoke: plastic, metal, who knows? All they know is that it stinks and they feel sick.

The factory, New Sky Metal, is part of a thriving e-waste industry across Southeast Asia, born of China's decision to stop accepting the world's electronic refuse, which was poisoning its land and people. Thailand in particular has become a center of the industry even as activists push back and its government wrestles to balance competing interests of public safety with the profits to be made from the lucrative trade.

Last year, Thailand banned the import of foreign e-waste. Yet new factories are opening across the country, and tons of e-waste are being processed, environmental monitors and industry experts say.

"E-waste has to go somewhere," said Jim Puckett, the executive director of the Basel Action Network, which campaigns against trash dumping in poor countries, "and the Chinese are simply moving their entire operations to Southeast Asia."

"The only way to make money is to get huge volume with cheap, illegal labor and pollute the hell out of the environment," he added.

Each year, 50 million tons of electronic waste are produced globally, according to the United Nations, as consumers grow accustomed to throwing away last year's model and acquiring the next new thing.

The notion of recycling these gadgets sounds virtuous: an infinite loop of technological utility.

But it is dirty and dangerous work to extract the tiny quantities of precious metals - like gold, silver and copper - from castoff phones, computers and televisions.

For years, China took in much of the world's electronic refuse. Then in 2018, Beijing closed its borders to foreign e-waste. Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia - with their lax enforcement of environmental laws, easily exploited labor force and cozy nexus between business and government - saw an opportunity.

"Every circuit and every cable is very lucrative, especially if there is no concern for the environment or for workers," said Penchom Saetang, the head of Ecological Alert and Recovery Thailand, an environmental watchdog.

While Southeast Asian nations like Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines have rejected individual shipments of waste from Western countries, Thailand was the first to push back more systematically against the electronic refuse deluging its ports.

In June of last year, the Thai Ministry of Industry announced with great fanfare the ban on foreign e-waste. The police made a series of high-profile raids on at least 10 factories, including New Sky Metal.

"New Sky is closed now, totally closed," Yutthana Poolpipat, the head of the Laem Chabang Port customs bureau, said in September. "There is no electronic waste coming into Thailand, zero."

But a recent visit to the hamlet of Koh Khanun showed that the factory was still up and running, as are many others, a reflection of the weak regulatory system and corruption that has tainted the country.

Despite the headlines about the police raid, New Sky Metal was fined a maximum of only $650 for each of its licensing infractions.

Since the e-waste ban, 28 new recycling factories, most dealing with electronic refuse, began operations in one province east of Bangkok, Chachoengsao, where Koh Khanun is located, according to provincial statistics. This year, 14 businesses in that province were granted licenses to process electronic waste.

Most of the new factories are in central Thailand between Bangkok and Laem Chabang, the nation's biggest port, but more provinces are allowing the businesses.

Thai officials say that some incinerators may still be burning because factories are working through old stockpiles. Plants may also be processing domestic rather than foreign refuse, they say.

But neither explanation is likely, according to industry experts. Hoards of imported waste wouldn't last this long. And the amount of electronic trash that Thailand produces is far outpaced by the number of new factories.

Foreign e-waste might be smuggled into the country mislabeled as scrap, said Banjong Sukreeta, the deputy director general of the Department of Industrial Works.

"Ask customs about falsified declarations," he said. "Rules are not enough if the people who implement them are not up to it."

But Mr. Yutthana, of the customs bureau, said every box that landed at his port was inspected thoroughly.

"We are 100 percent careful," he said.

In October of this year, the Thai legislature unveiled loosened labor and environmental regulations for all factories, a move that has benefited the e-waste industry. Under one provision, small companies are no longer subject to pollution monitoring.

At the same time, a draft bill that would ensure tighter control over Thailand's electronic waste industry has languished in legislative purgatory.

"Thailand is welcoming environmental degradation with its own laws," said Somnuck Jongmeewasin, a lecturer in environmental management at Silpakorn University International College. "There are so many loopholes and ways to escape punishment."

The consequences are frightening.

If some types of electronic waste aren't incinerated at a high enough temperature, dioxins, which can cause cancer and developmental problems, infiltrate the food supply. Without proper safeguarding, toxic heavy metals seep into the soil and groundwater.

Locals who fought against the deluge of trash have been attacked.

"Why don't you in the West recycle your own waste?" said Phayao Jaroonwong, a farmer east of Bangkok, who said her crops had withered after an electronic waste factory moved in next door.

"Thailand can't take it anymore," she said. "We shouldn't be the world's dumping ground."

Phra Chayaphat Kuntaweera, a Buddhist abbot, has watched as several waste-processing factories opened around his temple. Two more are under construction.

First, the monks began to cough, he said. Then they vomited. When the incinerators burned, their headaches raged.

"Monks are people, too," he said. "We get sick from the fumes just like anyone else."

Even in cases in which wrongdoing is acknowledged, follow-through is weak. This year, officials admitted that 2,900 tons of electronic waste seized in last year's raids had gone missing.

The police had left the stockpile in the care of the Chinese manager, who later skipped the country.

In September, Sumate Rianpongnam, an activist, campaigned against the e-waste industry's polluting his hometown, Kabinburi. That night, men on motorcycles shot bullets into the air near his home and raced off.

In Thailand, millions of undocumented workers from poorer countries like Myanmar and Cambodia are vulnerable to abuse, environmental watchdogs say, adding that the need for such laborers will only intensify.

Of the 14 factories granted licenses to process e-waste this year in Chachoengsao Province, six are in Koh Khanun. Five are linked to the man whose name is associated with New Sky Metal, or with his wife.

"We can't choose the air we breathe," said Ms. Metta, the eucalyptus farmer. "Now there will be even more factories. We are all going to die a slow death."

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The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand's Lungs

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KOH KHANUN, Thailand - Crouched on the ground in a dimly lit factory, the women picked through the discarded innards of the modern world: batteries, circuit boards and bundles of wires. They broke down the scrap - known as e-waste - with hammers and raw hands.

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Unrest in India is spreading after the nation’s Parliament and the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi passed a sweeping new citizenship law last week that favors every South Asian faith other than Islam. Many see the passage of the new law as anti-Muslim, disadvantaging the country’s huge Muslim minority of 200 million. Over the past few days, furious protests have broken out on college campuses and in packed streets of a growing list of cities — Mumbai, Chennai, Varanasi, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Patna, Pondicherry — and several people have been killed as a result.

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Several people have been killed as unrest spreads to new corners of the country. Many see the passage of a new law as anti-Muslim.

Video

When students at a university in India's capital protested a controversial citizenship bill, the police responded with violence. We analyzed the footage to show the tactics officers are using. Credit Credit... Adnan Abidi/Reuters

NEW DELHI - Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has rounded up thousands of Muslims in Kashmir, revoked the area's autonomy and enforced a citizenship test in northeastern India that left nearly two million people potentially stateless, many of them Muslim.

But it was Mr. Modi's gamble to pass a sweeping new citizenship law that favors every South Asian faith other than Islam that has set off days of widespread protests.

The law, which easily passed both houses of Parliament last week, is the most overt sign, opponents say, that Mr. Modi intends to turn India into a Hindu-centric state that would leave the country's 200 million Muslims at a calculated disadvantage.

Indian Muslims, who have watched anxiously as Mr. Modi's government has pursued a Hindu nationalist program, have finally erupted in anger. Over the past few days, protests have broken in cities across the country.

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A march against the new citizenship law in Kolkata, India, on Monday. Credit... Rupak Chowdhuri/Reuters

Mumbai. Chennai. Varanasi. Guwahati. Hyderabad. Bhopal. Patna. Pondicherry. The disturbances keep spreading, and on Monday they tied up several areas of the capital, New Delhi.

Mr. Modi's government has responded by calling out troops, shutting down the internet and imposing curfews, just as it did when it clamped down on Kashmir. In New Delhi, police officers beat unarmed students with wooden poles, dragging them away and sending scores to the hospital. In Assam, they shot and killed several young men.

India's Muslims had stayed relatively quiet during the other recent setbacks, keenly aware of the electoral logic that has pushed them to the margins. India is about 80 percent Hindu, and 14 percent Muslim, and Mr. Modi and his party won a crushing election victory in May and handily control the Parliament.

But Indian Muslims are feeling increasingly desperate, and so are progressives, many Indians of other faiths, and those who see a secular government as fundamental to India's identity and its future.

The world is now weighing in, too. United Nations officials, American representatives, international advocacy groups and religious organizations have issued scathing statements saying that the citizenship law is blatantly discriminatory. Some are even calling for sanctions.

Critics are deeply worried that Mr. Modi is trying to wrench India away from its secular, democratic roots and turn this nation of 1.3 billion people into a religious state, a homeland for Hindus.

"They want a theocratic state,'' said B.N. Srikrishna, a former judge on India's Supreme Court. "This is pushing the country to the brink, to the brink of chaos."

"This is how waves of communal violence start in the country," he added.

Mr. Modi is no stranger to communal violence. The worst bloodshed that India has seen in recent years exploded on his watch, in 2002, in Gujarat, when he was the top official in the state and clashes between Hindus and Muslims killed more than 1,000 people - most of them Muslims.

Mr. Modi was widely blamed for not doing enough to stop it. Courts have cleared him, but many people believe he was at least partly responsible for the brutality that unfolded.

His grip on power is still firm, even with a weakening economy. The political opposition, including the once-dominant Indian National Congress party, has been disorganized and shaky compared with the juggernaut he and his right-hand man, Amit Shah, the home minister, have built in their Bharatiya Janata Party.

But this contentious citizenship law, which paves a special path for non-Muslim migrants in India to become citizens, has galvanized the opposition. Rival opposition leaders who usually can't agree on anything are planning protests together. Students from across the country are rallying to each other's defense. Each episode of harsh police action captured by mobile phone and beamed around cyberspace catalyzes more sympathy, more protests - and more prospects for violence.

On Monday, Mr. Modi called for calm, saying on Twitter that the law "does not affect any citizen of India of any religion" and "the need of the hour is for all of us to work together.''

This citizenship law was a much touted campaign promise and a special wish of his Hindu base. His supporters see a future India as a place that emphasizes its Hindu heritage as much as possible and eliminates the special legal protections that exist for Muslims and other minorities.

Some analysts are quick to point out that the course Mr. Modi's party is charting could lead to an India dominated by one faith and one viewpoint, where existential tensions hold back the economy and hamstring politics - as embodied by Pakistan, India's struggling, Islamic archenemy next door.

"We're chasing a failed dream,'' said Yogendra Yadav, a political commentator.

The new citizenship legislation, called the Citizenship Amendment Act, expedites Indian citizenship for migrants from some of India's neighboring countries if they are Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsee or Jain. Only one major religion in South Asia was left off: Islam.

Indian officials have denied any anti-Muslim bias and said the measure was intended purely to help persecuted minorities migrating from India's predominantly Muslim neighbors - Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

The legislation follows hand in hand with a divisive citizenship test conducted this summer in one state in northern India and possibly soon to be expanded nationwide.

All residents of Assam, along the Bangladesh border, had to produce documentary proof that they or their ancestors lived in India since 1971. Around two million of Assam's population of 33 million - a mix of Hindus and Muslims - failed to pass the test and now risk being rendered stateless. Huge new prisons are being built to house anyone determined to be an illegal immigrant.

A widespread belief is that the Indian government will use both these measures - the citizenship tests and the new citizenship law - to strip away rights from Muslims who have been living in India for generations. The way this will happen, many Muslim Indians fear, is that they will be asked to produce old birth certificates or property deeds necessary to prove citizenship and they will be unable to do so. And while Hindu residents in the same situation will be given a pass, it seems, Muslim residents will not have the same legal protections.

The protests started last week in Assam, led by Hindus and joined by Assamese Muslims and Christians. Many Hindus in Assam don't like the new law either: They fear it could open the floodgates to poor migrants who will settle in Assam and take their land. And so, despite the legislation's potential to drive a sectarian wedge across India, in Assam it backfired, unifying protesters across religious lines.

Witnesses said that security forces fired live ammunition into a crowd, killing a 17-year-old Christian student as he walked home. Outraged demonstrators then burned down train stations and attacked the police.

Struggling to maintain control, the central government sent in the army and shut down the internet. The angry crowds only grew.

On Sunday, the protests spread to Delhi. Students of Jamia Millia Islamia University, a predominantly Muslim institution, gathered peacefully, witnesses said. But chaos broke out after a separate group of violent protesters joined the fray and began clashing with the police, witnesses said.

The police response was swift and indiscriminate, according to witnesses, and videos widely circulated on social media showed officers beating students. In one video, a group of female students tries to rescue a young man from the grasp of the police. A squad of officers in riot gear tears him away and knocks him down with heavy blows. Even after the women form a protective circle around him, officers can be seen jabbing the young man with their wooden poles.

Observers said that while police brutality was common in poorer, more rural areas of India, it was extremely unusual to see it explode on such a scale in the capital.

Waqar Azam, a 26-year-old student, was studying in the university library when students burst in and yelled that the police were coming. The students locked the doors. Moments later, tear gas canisters crashed through the windows, filling the library with choking smoke.

"What is happening to Indian Muslims today did not happen overnight," Mr. Azam said. "If we don't protest against it now, we will end up living like slaves."

Mr. Modi's supporters have dismissed the protesters as being exclusively Muslim, or from a die-hard political opposition group. But in Assam, many protesters said they had voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party and now regretted it.

On Monday morning, some 5,000 protesters, of many faiths, gathered in central Guwahati, Assam's capital.

One chant echoed across town: "Down with Modi!"

Reporting was contributed by Suhasini Raj from Guwahati, India, by Vindu Goel from Mumbai and by Hari Kumar, Shalini Venugopal, Sameer Yasir and Karan Deep Singh from New Delhi.

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As Protests Rage on Citizenship Bill, Is India Becoming a Hindu Nation?

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Several people have been killed as unrest spreads to new corners of the country. Many see the passage of a new law as anti-Muslim. NEW DELHI - Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has rounded up thousands of Muslims in Kashmir, revoked the area's autonomy and enforced a citizenship test in northeastern India that left nearly two million people potentially stateless, many of them Muslim.

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In a dramatic, final-second victory, the Newtown High School football team won its first state championship in 27 years on Saturday — seven years to the day since the Sandy Hook massacre that made the Connecticut town’s name a byword for the national conversation about gun violence. Playing in the fog with just seconds to spare, the Newtown Nighthawks’ quarterback Jack Street connected with receiver Riley Ward for a 36-yard pass to win the game 13-7, CNN affiliate WTIC reported. “It was surreal,” Pete Paguaga told CNN. “It was a movie ending. I’m still searching for words to process what I saw.”

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newtown high wins football championship on 7th anniversary of sandy hook massacre - cnn

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Newtown High wins football championship on 7th anniversary of Sandy Hook massacre

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In Newtown, Connecticut, December 14 is normally clouded with sadness. It's the anniversary of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

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Heliogen, a clean-energy company that emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, said it has discovered a way to use artificial intelligence and a field of mirrors to reflect so much sunlight that it generates extreme heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius. The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. Cement alone accounts for 7% of global CO2 emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. “We are rolling out technology that can beat the price of fossil fuels and also not make the CO2 emissions,” Bill Gross, Heliogen’s founder and CEO, told “And that’s really the holy grail.”

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a new 'sesame street' show in arabic aims to help refugee children - cnn

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A new 'Sesame Street' show in Arabic aims to help refugee children

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Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee have joined forces to help Syrian refugee children through educational learning programs, including the launch of a new "Sesame Street" show in Arabic.

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Swinging cranes and clawing excavators have reshaped the landscape, elevating Charlotte’s skyline, expanding its girth and transforming this former cotton-shipment town into the South’s financial hub and one of America’s fastest-growing cities. But the Queen City has also been steadily unbuilding itself, bulldozing houses and razing apartment complexes along its creeks, ripping up a mall parking lot to reveal a hidden waterway and then stripping away its concrete banks, all in a bid to prevent the flash flooding that turns communities into deathtraps. The North Carolina county has removed 460 structures and replaced them with absorbent grasslands, winning national praise as a prototype for regional flood planning that anticipates the impact of projected development and the growing effects of extreme weather. The innovative strategy was ahead of the curve when it launched in the 1990s, by calculating future flood risk and then purchasing — and demolishing — vulnerable homes, businesses and office buildings. But the region is facing more-complex challenges as climate change threatens bigger and more-lasting deluges. Six of North Carolina’s seven wettest storms have occurred in the past 20 years. In June, following an 11-inch downpour upstream, the Catawba River burst its banks here in a catastrophe that can’t be cured by opening up a few extra acres of flood plain.

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Young trees are protected at the Chantilly Ecological Sanctuary along Briar Creek in Charlotte. (Eamon Queeney/For The Washington Post)

CHARLOTTE - Swinging cranes and clawing excavators have reshaped the landscape here, elevating Charlotte's skyline, expanding its girth and transforming this former cotton-shipment town into the South's financial hub and one of America's fastest-growing cities.

But the Queen City has also been steadily unbuilding itself, bulldozing houses and razing apartment complexes along its creeks, ripping up a mall parking lot to reveal a hidden waterway and then stripping away its concrete banks, all in a bid to prevent the flash flooding that turns communities into deathtraps.

The North Carolina county has removed 460 structures and replaced them with absorbent grasslands, winning national praise as a prototype for regional flood planning that anticipates the impact of projected development and the growing effects of extreme weather. The innovative strategy was ahead of the curve when it launched in the 1990s, by calculating future flood risk and then purchasing - and demolishing - vulnerable homes, businesses and office buildings.

But the region is facing more-complex challenges as climate change threatens bigger and more-lasting deluges. Six of North Carolina's seven wettest storms have occurred in the past 20 years. In June, following an 11-inch downpour upstream, the Catawba River burst its banks here in a catastrophe that can't be cured by opening up a few extra acres of flood plain.

"We just can't engineer ourselves out of this problem," said Bill Hunt, a civil engineer at North Carolina State University who predicts that more-drastic steps will become necessary to move entire communities out of danger.

"What Charlotte has done works very well for two- or three-inch rains," Hunt said. "But we don't have tools to fix 11- or 12-inch rains."

Amid flooding and rising sea levels, residents of one barrier island wonder if it's time to retreat

The program, operated jointly by the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, has provided 700 households with voluntary buyouts, replacing their houses and apartments with almost 200 acres of open land that can flood safely. It also gives technical and financial assistance to homeowners looking to elevate their properties above flood level.

The effort is backed by a utility fee levied on impervious surfaces in homes, government centers and office buildings. The buyout program has cost $64 million, though officials estimate that it has saved $28 million in property damage and now-unnecessary services like emergency rescues. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services expects the savings will reach $300 million from the homes it has already purchased.

About 85 percent of homeowners who have gone through Storm Water Services' appraisal process have accepted the buyout. Properties are chosen based on flood risk and an assessment of the financial impact that would follow.

As officials toured the recently flooded Catawba River area last month, they pointed out houses they hope to buy and others that will have to be raised above their current rooflines. They picked out telltale signs of June's flood: a cushion caught high up in a tree; faint lines of organic matter stuck on windows indicating the high-water mark; branches tangled around a tree trunk revealing the direction the torrents flowed.

It's all part of their detective work, figuring out how the floodwater behaved so they can advise residents whether they should consider elevating their homes or taking a buyout.

Bill Strain understood some of the flood risk when he bought a two-story house on Riverside Drive in February. The former police officer had whiled away many a summer day at a nearby Fraternity of Police campground, where he watched the Catawba River surge and swirl. But this was his dream house, with a back porch six feet above the water and a dock for his powerboat reaching out beyond. Strain and his wife moved in just weeks before June's deluge, which inundated them and more than 40 other nearby households.

Now, Strain, 72, is at work with power tools, ripping his walls back to studs and replacing flooring piece by piece. He has dismissed talk of a buyout, but welcomes in representatives from Storm Water Services, hoping instead that they will help him secure grants to elevate his house by about 12 feet.

"They ain't getting rid of me," said Strain, even as his neighbors reached different conclusions.

On one side, Ken Morgan has already taken a buyout and left. He is sorry his home will be demolished but content with the deal from Storm Water Services, based on the pre-flood fair market value minus damages, which allowed him to buy another house, mortgage-free, 10 miles away.

"I'm done playing along the river," said Morgan, 60. "I didn't want to live with that threat anymore, jacked up or not."

The neighbors on Strain's other side feel stranded. Their home was already elevated, but with two children, they needed extra space, so the family installed a video studio and bathroom on the ground floor. The floodwaters wrecked it all. And although they signed up for a buyout, they don't think they'll get one.

"Since we didn't have total loss to our property, we weren't a priority," said Sabrina Hilario, 43. Instead, they hope to sell their house.

As North Carolina focuses on getting ahead of hurricanes, some residents are hesitant to move

Not everyone trusts Storm Water Services, believing its goal may simply be to oust them and create a park, or suspecting that it is in cahoots with the behemoth Duke Energy, which controls the river's flow through hydroelectric dams. Hilario and others say they plan to file a class-action lawsuit against the company. (A spokesperson for Duke Energy said the company complied with federal licensing requirements for water levels.)

Storm Water Services is working on offers to buy out a dozen homes in the area. Morgan and two others have completed the process. Several others are in the works.

The riverine flooding is a new challenge for a program whose work on urban creeks has attracted attention among communities looking to mitigate their own risk, like Louisville, which implemented a "quick buy" program about five years ago, and Virginia Beach, which is threatened by a combination of sea-level rise and development.

"We have been looking across the country," said Erin Sutton, emergency manager for Virginia Beach, "and Charlotte keeps floating to the top."

Congress also appears to be recognizing the dangers that lie ahead. In a rare act of bipartisanship, the House and Senate have pending legislation that would make it easier for communities to set up similar programs to buy people out or elevate their homes by leveraging federal funds.

The key to Charlotte-Mecklenburg's success has lain in developing a more forward-looking means of mapping and assessing flood risk than the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 2000, Charlotte-Mecklenburg became the first U.S. community to show where flooding is likely to happen in the future based on projections of upstream development.

"The point," said David Canaan, director of Mecklenburg County Storm Water Services, "is looking into the future."

The program also has stood out for its ability to fund prompt buyouts with the storm-water utility fee levied on impervious surfaces. By comparison, FEMA's buyout program takes on average five years, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, by which time many residents have invested money and sweat equity into rebuilding and have little incentive to leave, setting up a cycle of repeat flooding.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg program continues to look at ways to hone preparedness, experimenting with cheaper - and thus more numerous - flood gauges that will allow residents to learn promptly of impending dangers.

The refreshed flood plains have been turned into public amenities - stream-side trails, sunken rain gardens, waist-high grasslands that provide a sanctuary for migrating butterflies - and a haven from harried urban life.

"The creeks and the nature and the animals, it's just a beautiful place to come," said Kathy Halverson, who paused on a pedestrian bridge near where more than 60 houses once stood to marvel at a pair of ducks dabbling in Little Sugar Creek below.

Those who don't accept a buyout see their surroundings change. Carol Thompson's brick home on Charlotte's Briar Creek now sits in a sea of green, where she once had neighbors. Thompson, who has lived there for 30 years, did not believe she could find as nice a property with the buyout money.

"Why tear it down?" said Thompson, who has built up flood protections around her house's foundation.

In the Catawba River neighborhood, several residents seem hesitant to move, saying they moved there - some into fishing shacks or trailers that they adapted into homes - because they valued the waterfront so highly. They have spotted speculators wandering the neighborhood, looking to get a quick deal in a spectacular setting.

Even if all 40 of the flooded homes were demolished, the newly open land would do little to stanch the vast quantity of water that came down the river in June, carrying runoff from several other counties before it reached Riverside Drive.

Strain is keenly aware of the benefits the Storm Water Services program brings - and also senses injustice. In other parts of the county, even on the hill above what remains of his dream house, new homes are going up as Charlotte continues its rapid expansion.

"They let the high-dollar guys build all these developments, and the little guys who've been here for 50 years are flooding and being moved out," Strain said.

"And they say that's progress."

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One city's plan to combat climate change: Bulldoze homes, rebuild paradise

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CHARLOTTE - Swinging cranes and clawing excavators have reshaped the landscape here, elevating Charlotte's skyline, expanding its girth and transforming this former cotton-shipment town into the South's financial hub and one of America's fastest-growing cities.

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Laurent Simons looks much like any other 9-year-old boy. Then he starts describing his work at a university in the Netherlands, developing a computer circuit that will replicate a part of the brain. The Belgian boy wonder is on track to become the world’s youngest university graduate when he completes a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology later this month. After completing high school in roughly a year, Laurent — born in Belgium but now living in the Netherlands — started college and is set to finish the three-year bachelor’s program in just nine months.

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9-year-old finishes college in just nine months

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November 24 As he cradles his puppy in his arms, Laurent Simons looks much like any other 9-year-old boy. Then he starts describing his work at a university in the Netherlands, developing a computer circuit that will replicate a part of the brain.

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Roy’Ale Hill, 12, and Roy’Nal Hill, 13 were shot in their old Southeast Washington neighborhood less than 80 days apart. The shootings came in a courtyard where they tossed footballs, rode bikes and hung out with friends. Police say neither brother was an intended target. Roy’Ale, left, was hit first, struck by one of at least 51 bullets fired on Valentine’s Day evening. He was under a shade tree heading home after buying a $1 pack of gum. Roy’Nal was shot May 4, while with buddies eating pizza steps from his front door. The bullet — one of at least a dozen fired — lodged in his lower spine, leaving the football fullback paralyzed from the waist down. They were two bullets out of thousands fired in the District this year, some claiming lives of children and adults, and sending many others into long recoveries from life-changing injuries.

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Roy'Nal is in his wheelchair, stuck outside the front door of his new home in Northeast Washington.

His brother hurries over.

Roy'Ale presses down on the handles, tilting the chair back to lift the front wheels, then pushes it onto a raised concrete pad. He repeats the steps to get the chair over the next hurdle, the doorstop.

Roy'Nal spreads his arms to brace himself against the door frame as Roy'Ale gives one final push on this summer evening. His brother slides into the dining area.

The middle-schoolers are home for the night.

Roy'Ale Hill, 12, and Roy'Nal Hill, 13, followed this routine for weeks, until housing officials made it easier by installing a ramp at the entrance to their Clay Terrace townhouse. The city placed the family here after one boy, and weeks later the other, was shot in their old neighborhood.

The boys were close before bullets stole their summer. They and a third brother, Roy, 14, bond under a rap music brand with an acronym they've turned into custom necklaces of three gold letters: "BNL."

It stands for "Brodie Never Left."

Brodie is their word for brother.

The shootings came 79 days apart in a courtyard where they tossed footballs, rode bikes and hung out with friends. Police say neither brother was an intended target.

Roy'Ale was hit first, struck by one of at least 51 bullets fired on Valentine's Day evening. He was under a shade tree heading home after buying a $1 pack of gum.

Roy'Nal was shot May 4, while with buddies eating pizza steps from his front door. The bullet - one of at least a dozen fired - lodged in his lower spine, leaving the football fullback paralyzed from the waist down.

They were two bullets out of thousands fired in the District this year, some claiming lives of children and adults, and sending many others into long recoveries from life-changing injuries.

Their stories are often eclipsed by the ones who didn't make it, tallied in the District's rising homicide count that has frustrated leaders and residents. A Washington Post poll found that nearly half of residents living in the city's most impoverished neighborhoods said they or someone they knew had been threatened with a gun or shot in the past five years.

Ten youths have been fatally shot this year in the District, one of them younger than the Hill brothers. He was Karon Brown, 11, slain trying to escape a dispute involving adults outside a fast-food restaurant in Southeast.

She and her twin were inseparable. Then a gunman tore the 15-year-olds apart.

The shootings of Roy'Ale and Roy'Nal shocked even the District's veteran police chief who couldn't fathom the unlikely probability of two brothers shot weeks apart in random violence.

Neither youth professes to be interested in seeing the gunmen arrested. But the impact is all too real, even as the brothers shrug it off as just another obstacle to overcome.

Roy'Ale is reluctant to venture outside alone; Roy'Nal needs help with everyday living, like climbing the stairs.

"I can't give up," Roy'Nal said. "It's not about me mad at the world."

'That's my son'

The strawberry-flavored gum Roy'Ale bought at Z-Mart was still in his pants pocket when he thought he heard firecrackers in his Kenilworth Parkside-Gardens neighborhood.

"I stopped and turned around," he said. A man with a gun ran by him. Then he saw another man starting to shoot. He thinks he was hit by accident or mistaken for the other gunman.

He made it a few steps to the street and fell. The staccato bursts of gunfire rattled inside his home one street over. That sound is common here, but this time it seemed to last forever, with more than 50 trigger pulls in rapid succession.

Concerned about her son, Ebonee Hill rushed into the winter darkness.

In her car, she crisscrossed the alleys cutting through the maze of courtyards, and once she reached Ponds Street she saw someone on the ground. The victim's boyish face was pressed to the pavement, but she saw the distinctive knots in his hair.

A police officer pushed her away.

"That's my son," she screamed.

Hill, a single mother of seven, grew up in Northeast Washington's Trinidad neighborhood, took college classes and once dreamed of being a homicide detective.

Now she stood on a dark street under the strobe lights of a police car.

"What's his name?" the cop asked.

"His name is Roy'Ale."

The sixth-grader had lost consciousness.

Paramedics wouldn't allow Hill into the ambulance, so she jumped in her car and trailed to Children's National Hospital, where Roy'Ale would spend the next 22 days.

The bullet had entered his back. It fractured two ribs and collapsed a lung before it exited his chest.

It missed his spinal cord by a fraction of an inch.

Boy, 13, shot weeks after his younger brother struck by gunfire in same neighborhood

Eleven weeks later, another of her sons was not as fortunate.

Roy'Nal was with his friends near his front door when a burst of gunfire claimed the night. He had just turned down a pizza slice when he was shot.

Hill was out running errands when she heard from frantic family. She called her sister Brittney, who was in a car racing her nephew to a hospital.

"Where's Nal at?" Hill demanded.

"He's in the back seat," her sister answered.

"What happened to him?"

"He got shot."

Brittney passed the phone to Roy'Nal.

"Yeah, Mom," he answered.

Roy'Nal ended up at Children's National Hospital, where his brother had been treated. The next day, the teen overheard his mom and a doctor talking in hushed tones.

The bullet damaged the 11th thoracic vertebra, the next to last counting down from the top.

Roy'Nal was paralyzed from his belly button down.

"Am I going to live?" he asked.

"Yes, you're going to live," his mom answered.

"Then everything will be all right," the seventh-grader replied.

Childhood robbed

Roy'Nal is doing push-ups.

"All the way down," Sarah Stone urges, holding his legs.

She presses.

"All the way down, until your nose touches the mat."

Stone has been a physical therapist at MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital for five years. People with some of the worst injuries to their brains and spinal cords come through here for help moving on with their lives.

Roy'Nal is the youngest patient Stone has had.

He progresses swiftly through the exercises, helped by a combination of his youth and football conditioning. But it is hard to balance when you can't feel your legs, and the brain doesn't recognize your feet on the ground.

In one session, a simple game of catch tests whether Roy'Nal can sit up and grab a ball without falling over. At another, he positions his wheelchair under parallel bars, then does pullups to strengthen his arms.

These weekly outings to the rehab sessions are what passed for summer for the Hill family.

Ebonee Hill, who had taken time off her Postal Service job when Roy'Ale was shot, again took unpaid leave to be with Roy'Nal. A planned visit to a relative in Florida did not happen. A family reunion in South Carolina was put on hold. There was no graduation party for their older sister.

The shooters, Hill said, "robbed my kids of their childhood."

The family of eight also moved, from the boxy apartments and grassy courtyards of Kenilworth to the asphalt cul-de-sacs of Clay Terrace, one notorious housing project exchanged for another.

Mayor, police chief add new initiatives to address violence after two teens killed days apart

For a time, their new townhouse had no ramp, making it a struggle for Roy'Nal to get in and out. The only bathroom is upstairs, requiring him to get help climbing the stairs or forcing him into a closet to relieve himself through a catheter.

Since they moved, two men, one of whom the family knew, were shot and killed near the home they left behind. At their new home in Clay Terrace, a makeshift memorial to a slain man is just steps from their front door.

One of the first neighbors to greet Hill was the mother of Makiyah Wilson, a 10-year-old fatally shot last year as she headed to an ice cream truck. She was struck in the heart by one of 76 bullets fired by four gunmen who sprayed a courtyard.

Hill's youngest daughter joined Makiyah's Scouts, a group founded by the slain girl's family to inspire young women.

Roy'Nal passed the time playing with his brothers on an Xbox donated by D.C. police officers and writing and singing his rap songs.

He's often quiet, preferring to express himself through his music. While at Children's, he started a song as he gazed out a window, watching cars he surmised were headed for the city's exits.

Trying to find a way I'm going to escape and get away.

In a rare moment, he shared his confusion over his injury. He said a doctor told him to think of his spinal cord as a television cord. When the cord breaks, the TV goes out.

But a new cord will fix the TV. So why can't he just get a new spine?

"Sometimes I just don't get it," he said. "I want to walk again."

Summer's end

Roy'Nal rolls his wheelchair down the familiar streets of his old Kenilworth Parkside-Gardens neighborhood. He pops a few wheelies, catches up with friends and scouts the perfect place to record his latest rap video, "Ooooh."

It's the first time the brothers have returned since he was shot.

"Ooooh" is about seeking money over girls. Hill envisions her son's wheelchair moving down the middle of a path. But Roy'Nal chooses a courtyard between two housing blocks, steps from where his brother was shot.

He recorded the lyrics earlier; now they blare from a speaker as he performs. His friends, some strangers and Roy'Ale surround him.

I'm making money, I'm not changing.

I saw you there, but you were taken.

I thought you were real, I was mistaken.

The videographer wants more action. He encourages Roy'Nal to move to the beat, then invites onlookers to dance. His friends dig into their pockets for some bills for the teen to fan out.

Roy'Ale hangs back, almost off camera, clinging to the entourage, silent.

Their summer is over.

Roy'Ale and Roy'Nal are back at Kelly Miller Middle School, now in the 7th and 8th grades, respectively.

Their oldest sister is off to college, maybe to be a defense attorney. Their mother is back to work. And Roy'Nal has new leg braces that help him get around. A family video shows him coming down the stairs, holding the railing with one hand and pressing against the wall with the other. Slowly, he hops from step to step.

At the bottom, he takes a breath, then grabs a walker to cross the living room.

He put 224 guns on the street. His family would pay a price.

Arrested as teens, three men exonerated after 36 years behind bars for wrongful murder conviction

Found insane in one killing, police say D.C. man killed again.

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Two D.C. brothers, two errant bullets and a family forever changed

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Roy'Nal is in his wheelchair, stuck outside the front door of his new home in Northeast Washington. His brother hurries over. Roy'Ale presses down on the handles, tilting the chair back to lift the front wheels, then pushes it onto a raised concrete pad.

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Six months ago over a million people in Hong Kong marched through the city in what became the start of a sustained pro-democracy movement against Beijing’s tightening grip. On Sunday, they did it again. At least 800,000 people, according to organizers, showed up in the same park, waving signs calling for the end of Chinese Communist Party rule and for the Hong Kong government to meet protesters’ four existing demands. The march, which was approved by authorities, was one of the biggest peaceful protests seen in the city for months and underscores the strong support that still exists for greater democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, despite a crackdown that has seen police fire over 10,000 tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and arrest some 6,000 people.

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A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign. U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They weren’t, and they knew it. The documents include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle. In interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

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The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.

By

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

More stories

The Afghanistan Papers

Part 1: At war with the truth

Part 1
At war with the truth

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.

Part 2
Stranded without a strategy

Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.

Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in "nation-building," it has wasted billions doing just that

Part 4
Consumed by corruption

The U.S. flooded the country with money - then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled

Part 5
Unguarded nation

Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption

Part 6
Overwhelmed by opium

The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn

Interviews and memos
Explore the documents

Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history

Post Reports
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In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

Click any underlined text in the story to see the statement in the original document

"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan - we didn't know what we were doing,"Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: "What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document

"If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,"Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. "Who will say this was in vain?"Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents - George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump - and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government's botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan's thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?"Jeffrey Eggers | Lessons Learned interview | 8/25/2015 Tap to view full document Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, "After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan."Jeffrey Eggers | Lessons Learned interview | 8/25/2015 Tap to view full document

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul - and at the White House - to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

"Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,"Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. "Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced thatBob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone."Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show "the American people have constantly been lied to."

The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko's agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

In 2014, at Sopko's direction, SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled "Lessons Learned," the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

The Lessons Learned staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war. Most were Americans, but SIGAR analysts also traveled to London, Brussels and Berlin to interview NATO allies. In addition, they interviewed about 20 Afghan officials, discussing reconstruction and development programs.

Drawing partly on the interviews, as well as other government records and statistics, SIGAR has published seven Lessons Learned reports since 2016 that highlight problems in Afghanistan and recommend changes to stabilize the country.

But the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

"We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians," read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.

The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post began seeking Lessons Learned interview records in August 2016. SIGAR refused, arguing that the documents were privileged and that the public had no right to see them.

The Post had to sue SIGAR in federal court - twice - to compel it to release the documents.

The agency eventually disclosed more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 of the interviews, as well as several audio recordings.

The documents identify 62 of the people who were interviewed, but SIGAR blacked out the names of 366 others. In legal briefs, the agency contended that those individuals should be seen as whistleblowers and informants who might face humiliation, harassment, retaliation or physical harm if their names became public.

By cross-referencing dates and other details from the documents, The Post independently identified 33 other people who were interviewed, including several former ambassadors, generals and White House officials.

The Post has asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of everyone else interviewed, arguing that the public has a right to know which officials criticized the war and asserted that the government had misled the American people. The Post also argued the officials were not whistleblowers or informants, because they were not interviewed as part of an investigation.

A decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington has been pending since late September.

The Post is publishing the documents now, instead of waiting for a final ruling, to inform the public while the Trump administration is negotiating with the Taliban and considering whether to withdraw the 13,000 U.S. troops who remain in Afghanistan.

The Post attempted to contact for comment everyone whom it was able to identify as having given an interview to SIGAR. Their responses are compiled in a separate article.

Sopko, the inspector general, told The Post that he did not suppress the blistering criticisms and doubts about the war that officials raised in the Lessons Learned interviews. He said it took his office three years to release the records because he has a small staff and because other federal agencies had to review the documents to prevent government secrets from being disclosed.

"We didn't sit on it," he said. "We're firm believers in openness and transparency, but we've got to follow the law. . . . I think of any inspector general, I've probably been the most forthcoming on information."

The interview records are raw and unedited, and SIGAR's Lessons Learned staff did not stitch them into a unified narrative. But they are packed with tough judgments from people who shaped or carried out U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

"We don't invade poor countries to make them rich,"James Dobbins | Lessons Learned interview | 1/11/2016 Tap to view full document James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. "We don't invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan."James Dobbins | Lessons Learned interview | 1/11/2016 Tap to view full document

To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

Dubbed "snowflakes" by Rumsfeld and his staff, the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings, often several times a day.

Rumsfeld made a select number of his snowflakes public in 2011, posting them online in conjunction with his memoir, "Known and Unknown." But most of his snowflake collection - an estimated 59,000 pages - remained secret.

In 2017, in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, the Defense Department began reviewing and releasing the remainder of Rumsfeld's snowflakes on a rolling basis. The Archive shared them with The Post.

Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.

Worded in Rumsfeld's brusque style, many of the snowflakes foreshadow problems that continue to haunt the U.S. military more than a decade later.

"I may be impatient. In fact I know I'm a bit impatient,"Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document Rumsfeld wrote in one memo to several generals and senior aides. "We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave."Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document

"Help!"Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document he wrote.

The memo was dated April 17, 2002 - six months after the war started.

What they said in public April 17, 2002

"The history of military conflict in Afghanistan [has] been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We're not going to repeat that mistake."

- President George W. Bush, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute

With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the public, the Lessons Learned interviews broadly resemble the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

When they were leaked in 1971, the Pentagon Papers caused a sensation by revealing the government had long misled the public about how the United States came to be embroiled in Vietnam.

Bound into 47 volumes, the 7,000-page study was based entirely on internal government documents - diplomatic cables, decision-making memos, intelligence reports. To preserve secrecy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara issued an order prohibiting the authors from interviewing anyone.

SIGAR's Lessons Learned project faced no such restrictions. Staffers carried out the interviews between 2014 and 2018, mostly with officials who served during the Bush and Obama years.

About 30 of the interview records are transcribed, word-for-word accounts. The rest are typed summaries of conversations: pages of notes and quotes from people with different vantage points in the conflict, from provincial outposts to the highest circles of power.

Some of the interviews are inexplicably short. The interview record with John Allen, the Marine general who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013, consists of five paragraphs.

In contrast, records of interviews with other influential figures are much more extensive. Former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker sat for two interviews that yielded 95 transcribed pages.

Unlike the Pentagon Papers, none of the Lessons Learned documents were originally classified as a government secret. Once The Post pushed to make them public, however, other federal agencies intervened and classified some material after the fact.

The State Department, for instance, asserted that releasing portions of certain interviews could jeopardize negotiations with the Taliban to end the war. The Defense Department and Drug Enforcement Administration also classified some interview excerpts.

The Lessons Learned interviews contain few revelations about military operations. But running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective - to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.

Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women's rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.

"With the AfPak strategy there was a present under the Christmas tree for everyone,"Lessons Learned interview | 5/18/2015 Tap to view full document an unidentified U.S. official told government interviewers in 2015. "By the time you were finished you had so many priorities and aspirations it was like no strategy at all."Lessons Learned interview | 5/18/2015 Tap to view full document

The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA's payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn't tell friend from foe.

"They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live,"Lessons Learned interview | 12/15/2017 Tap to view full document an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. "It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: 'But who are the bad guys, where are they?' "Lessons Learned interview | 12/15/2017 Tap to view full document

The view wasn't any clearer from the Pentagon.

"I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,"Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document Rumsfeld complained in a Sept. 8, 2003, snowflake. "We are woefully deficient in human intelligence."Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document

What they said in public Dec. 1, 2009

"The days of providing a blank check are over. . . . It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan."

- President Barack Obama, in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.

On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan - more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was marred from the start.

U.S. officials tried to create - from scratch - a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.

"Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,"Former State Department official | Lessons Learned interview | 7/10/2015 Tap to view full document an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. "The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn't have."Former State Department official | Lessons Learned interview | 7/10/2015 Tap to view full document

Meanwhile, the United States flooded the fragile country with far more aid than it could possibly absorb.

During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.

One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: "We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason."Lessons Learned interview | 10/7/2016 Tap to view full document

Many aid workers blamed Congress for what they saw as a mindless rush to spend.

One unidentified contractor told government interviewers he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county. He once asked a visiting congressman whether the lawmaker could responsibly spend that kind of money back home: "He said hell no. 'Well, sir, that's what you just obligated us to spend and I'm doing it for communities that live in mud huts with no windows.' "Senior USAID official | Lessons Learned interview | 8/15/2016 Tap to view full document

The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers - allies of Washington - plundered with impunity.

Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had "self-organized into a kleptocracy"Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016 Tap to view full document by 2006 - and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy.

"I like to use a cancer analogy,"Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016 Tap to view full document Kolenda told government interviewers. "Petty corruption is like skin cancer; there are ways to deal with it and you'll probably be just fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher level, is like colon cancer; it's worse, but if you catch it in time, you're probably ok. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it's fatal."Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016 Tap to view full document

By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.

"Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption,"Ryan Crocker | Lessons Learned interview | 1/11/2016 Tap to view full document Crocker, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012, told government interviewers. He added, "Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it's somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it."Ryan Crocker | Lessons Learned interview | 1/11/2016 Tap to view full document

What they said in public Sept. 4, 2013

"This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day. And I think that's an important story to be told across the board."

- Then-Army Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, praising the Afghan security forces during a press briefing from Kabul. Milley is now a four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries - paid by U.S. taxpayers - for tens of thousands of "ghost soldiers."

None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

One unidentified U.S. soldier said Special Forces teams "hated"U.S. Special Forces officer | Lessons Learned interview | 9/7/2016 Tap to view full document the Afghan police whom they trained and worked with, calling them "awful - the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel."U.S. Special Forces officer | Lessons Learned interview | 9/7/2016 Tap to view full document

A U.S. military officer estimated that one-third of police recruits were "drug addicts or Taliban."U.S. military officer | Lessons Learned interview | 10/20/2016 Tap to view full document Yet another called them "stealing fools"Victor Glaviano | Lessons Learned interview | 4/11/2017 Tap to view full document who looted so much fuel from U.S. bases that they perpetually smelled of gasoline.

"Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,"Senior USAID official | Lessons Learned interview | 8/15/2016 Tap to view full document an unnamed senior USAID official told government interviewers.

Meanwhile, as U.S. hopes for the Afghan security forces failed to materialize, Afghanistan became the world's leading source of a growing scourge: opium.

The United States has spent about $9 billion to fight the problem over the past 18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating more opium poppies than ever. Last year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82 percent of global opium production, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, former officials said almost everything they did to constrain opium farming backfired.

"We stated that our goal is to establish a 'flourishing market economy,' "Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document said Douglas Lute, the White House's Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. "I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade - this is the only part of the market that's working."Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document

From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency.

No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.

"It was a dog's breakfast with no chance of working,"Former senior British official | Lessons Learned interview | 9/21/2016 Tap to view full document an unnamed former senior British official told government interviewers.

The agencies and allies made things worse by embracing a dysfunctional muddle of programs, according to the interviews.

At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops - which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S. government eradicated poppy fields without compensation - which only infuriated farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.

"It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly,"U.S. official | Lessons Learned interview | 5/11/2016 Tap to view full document one U.S. official told government interviewers.

What they said in public Sept. 8, 2008

"Are we losing this war? Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way."

- Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, in a news briefing from Afghanistan

The specter of Vietnam has hovered over Afghanistan from the start.

On Oct. 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing the Taliban, a reporter asked Bush: "Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?"

"We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam," Bush replied confidently. "People often ask me, 'How long will this last?' This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring al-Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail."

In those early days, other U.S. leaders mocked the notion that the nightmare of Vietnam might repeat itself in Afghanistan.

"All together now - quagmire!" Rumsfeld joked at a news conference on Nov. 27, 2001.

But throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam - manipulating public opinion.

In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going - and especially when it is going badly - they emphasize how they are making progress.

For example, some snowflakes that Rumsfeld released with his memoir show he had received a string of unusually dire warnings from the war zone in 2006.

After returning from a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general, reported the Taliban had made an impressive comeback and predicted that "we will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming 24 months."

"The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years - leaving NATO holding the bag - and the whole thing will collapse again into mayhem," McCaffrey wrote in June 2006.

Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said "enormous popular discontent is building" against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.

Yet with Rumsfeld's personal blessing, the Pentagon buried the bleak warnings and told the public a very different story.

In October 2006, Rumsfeld's speechwriters delivered a paper titled "Afghanistan: Five Years Later." Brimming with optimism, it highlighted more than 50 promising facts and figures, from the number of Afghan women trained in "improved poultry management" (more than 19,000) to the "average speed on most roads" (up 300 percent).

"Five years on, there is a multitude of good news," it read. "While it has become fashionable in some circles to call Afghanistan a forgotten war, or to say the United States has lost its focus, the facts belie the myths."

Rumsfeld thought it was brilliant.

"This paper," he wrote in a memo, "is an excellent piece. How do we use it? Should it be an article? An Op-ed piece? A handout? A press briefing? All of the above? I think it ought to get it to a lot of people."

His staffers made sure it did. They circulated a version to reporters and posted it on Pentagon websites.

Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.

"We're making some steady progress," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters in September 2008, even as he and other U.S. commanders in Kabul were urgently requesting reinforcements to cope with a rising tide of Taliban fighters.

Two years later, as the casualty rate among U.S. and NATO troops climbed to another high, Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez held a news conference in Kabul.

"First, we are steadily making deliberate progress," he said.

In March 2011, during congressional hearings, skeptical lawmakers pelted Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, with doubts that the U.S. strategy was working.

"The past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress," Petraeus responded.

One year later, during a visit to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stuck to the same script - even though he had just personally dodged a suicide attack.

"The campaign, as I've pointed out before, I think has made significant progress," Panetta told reporters.

In July 2016, after a surge in Taliban attacks on major cities, Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the time, repeated the refrain.

"We are seeing some progress," he told reporters.

What they said in public March 27, 2009

"Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable."

- Obama, in remarks from the White House

During Vietnam, U.S. military commanders relied on dubious measurements to persuade Americans that they were winning.

Most notoriously, the Pentagon highlighted "body counts," or the number of enemy fighters killed, and inflated the figures as a measurement of success.

In Afghanistan, with occasional exceptions, the U.S. military has generally avoided publicizing body counts. But the Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

"It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,"Senior National Security Council official | Lessons Learned interview | 9/16/2016 Tap to view full document the senior NSC official told government interviewers in 2016. "The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war."

Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban's desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.

"It was their explanations," the senior NSC official said. "For example, attacks are getting worse? 'That's because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.' Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? 'It's because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it's actually an indicator that we're winning.' "

"And this went on and on for two reasons," the senior NSC official said, "to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate."

In other field reports sent up the chain of command, military officers and diplomats took the same line. Regardless of conditions on the ground, they claimed they were making progress.

"From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a great job,"Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, told government interviewers in 2015. "Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?"Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document

Upon arrival in Afghanistan, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were given the same basic mission: to protect the population and defeat the enemy, according to Flynn, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer.

"So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that mission,"Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document said Flynn, who later briefly served as Trump's national security adviser, lost his job in a scandal and was convicted of lying to the FBI. "Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan . . . and say, 'You know what, we didn't accomplish our mission.' "Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document

He added: "So the next guy that shows up finds it [their area] screwed up . . . and then they come back and go, 'Man this is really bad.' "Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document

Bob Crowley, the retired Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers that "truth was rarely welcome"Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document at military headquarters in Kabul.

"Bad news was often stifled,"Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document he said. "There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small - we're running over kids with our MRAPs [armored vehicles] - because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn't welcome."Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document

John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results.

"They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop,"John Garofano | Lessons Learned interview | 10/15/2015 Tap to view full document he told government interviewers. "There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this."John Garofano | Lessons Learned interview | 10/15/2015 Tap to view full document

But Garofano said nobody dared to question whether the charts and numbers were credible or meaningful.

"There was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you towards your goal?"John Garofano | Lessons Learned interview | 10/15/2015 Tap to view full document he said. "How do you show this as evidence of success and not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?"John Garofano | Lessons Learned interview | 10/15/2015 Tap to view full document

Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one the U.S. government rarely likes to discuss in public.

"I do think the key benchmark is the one I've suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed," James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. "If the number's going up, you're losing. If the number's going down, you're winning. It's as simple as that."

Last year, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, according to the United Nations.

That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties a decade ago.

If you have information to share about The Afghanistan Papers, contact The Post at afghanpapers@washpost.com.

Were you or one of your family members involved in the Afghanistan war? Tell us about your experiences.
Share your story

Part 1
At war with the truth

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.

Part 2
Stranded without a strategy

Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.

Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in "nation-building," it has wasted billions doing just that

Part 4
Consumed by corruption

The U.S. flooded the country with money - then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled

Part 5
Unguarded nation

Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption

Part 6
Overwhelmed by opium

The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn

Interviews and memos
Explore the documents

Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history

Post Reports
'We didn't know what the task was'

Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

The fight for the documents
About the investigation

It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records

More stories A visual timeline of the war Interviewees respond Share your story about the war

About this story

Design and development by Jake Crump, Armand Emamdjomeh and Matt Callahan. Editing by David Fallis and Jeff Leen. Photo editing, research and document illustration by Nick Kirkpatrick. Graphics by Laris Karklis and Leslie Shapiro. Copy editing by J.J. Evans. Video by Joyce Lee. Senior video production by Tom LeGro. Audio editing by Ted Muldoon. Digital operations by María Sánchez Díez. Audience engagement by Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn and Ric Sanchez. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya.

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office of the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction

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Confidential documents reveal U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan

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The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war By A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

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More than 2,000 pages of confidential U.S. government interviews and memos obtained by The Post reveal a secret history of the war in Afghanistan. U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures. The documents bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day and underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

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The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.

By

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

More stories

The Afghanistan Papers

Part 1: At war with the truth

Part 1
At war with the truth

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.

Part 2
Stranded without a strategy

Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.

Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in "nation-building," it has wasted billions doing just that

Part 4
Consumed by corruption

The U.S. flooded the country with money - then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled

Part 5
Unguarded nation

Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption

Part 6
Overwhelmed by opium

The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn

Interviews and memos
Explore the documents

Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history

Post Reports
'We didn't know what the task was'

Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

The fight for the documents
About the investigation

It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records

More stories
A visual timeline of the war

Interviewees respond

Share your story about the war

Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

Click any underlined text in the story to see the statement in the original document

"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan - we didn't know what we were doing,"Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: "What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document

"If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,"Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. "Who will say this was in vain?"Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents - George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump - and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government's botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan's thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?"Jeffrey Eggers | Lessons Learned interview | 8/25/2015 Tap to view full document Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, "After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan."Jeffrey Eggers | Lessons Learned interview | 8/25/2015 Tap to view full document

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul - and at the White House - to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

"Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,"Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. "Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced thatBob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone."Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show "the American people have constantly been lied to."

The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko's agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

In 2014, at Sopko's direction, SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled "Lessons Learned," the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

The Lessons Learned staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war. Most were Americans, but SIGAR analysts also traveled to London, Brussels and Berlin to interview NATO allies. In addition, they interviewed about 20 Afghan officials, discussing reconstruction and development programs.

Drawing partly on the interviews, as well as other government records and statistics, SIGAR has published seven Lessons Learned reports since 2016 that highlight problems in Afghanistan and recommend changes to stabilize the country.

But the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

"We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians," read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.

The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post began seeking Lessons Learned interview records in August 2016. SIGAR refused, arguing that the documents were privileged and that the public had no right to see them.

The Post had to sue SIGAR in federal court - twice - to compel it to release the documents.

The agency eventually disclosed more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 of the interviews, as well as several audio recordings.

The documents identify 62 of the people who were interviewed, but SIGAR blacked out the names of 366 others. In legal briefs, the agency contended that those individuals should be seen as whistleblowers and informants who might face humiliation, harassment, retaliation or physical harm if their names became public.

By cross-referencing dates and other details from the documents, The Post independently identified 33 other people who were interviewed, including several former ambassadors, generals and White House officials.

The Post has asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of everyone else interviewed, arguing that the public has a right to know which officials criticized the war and asserted that the government had misled the American people. The Post also argued the officials were not whistleblowers or informants, because they were not interviewed as part of an investigation.

A decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington has been pending since late September.

The Post is publishing the documents now, instead of waiting for a final ruling, to inform the public while the Trump administration is negotiating with the Taliban and considering whether to withdraw the 13,000 U.S. troops who remain in Afghanistan.

The Post attempted to contact for comment everyone whom it was able to identify as having given an interview to SIGAR. Their responses are compiled in a separate article.

Sopko, the inspector general, told The Post that he did not suppress the blistering criticisms and doubts about the war that officials raised in the Lessons Learned interviews. He said it took his office three years to release the records because he has a small staff and because other federal agencies had to review the documents to prevent government secrets from being disclosed.

"We didn't sit on it," he said. "We're firm believers in openness and transparency, but we've got to follow the law. . . . I think of any inspector general, I've probably been the most forthcoming on information."

The interview records are raw and unedited, and SIGAR's Lessons Learned staff did not stitch them into a unified narrative. But they are packed with tough judgments from people who shaped or carried out U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

"We don't invade poor countries to make them rich,"James Dobbins | Lessons Learned interview | 1/11/2016 Tap to view full document James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. "We don't invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan."James Dobbins | Lessons Learned interview | 1/11/2016 Tap to view full document

To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

Dubbed "snowflakes" by Rumsfeld and his staff, the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings, often several times a day.

Rumsfeld made a select number of his snowflakes public in 2011, posting them online in conjunction with his memoir, "Known and Unknown." But most of his snowflake collection - an estimated 59,000 pages - remained secret.

In 2017, in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, the Defense Department began reviewing and releasing the remainder of Rumsfeld's snowflakes on a rolling basis. The Archive shared them with The Post.

Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.

Worded in Rumsfeld's brusque style, many of the snowflakes foreshadow problems that continue to haunt the U.S. military more than a decade later.

"I may be impatient. In fact I know I'm a bit impatient,"Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document Rumsfeld wrote in one memo to several generals and senior aides. "We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave."Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document

"Help!"Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document he wrote.

The memo was dated April 17, 2002 - six months after the war started.

What they said in public April 17, 2002

"The history of military conflict in Afghanistan [has] been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We're not going to repeat that mistake."

- President George W. Bush, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute

With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the public, the Lessons Learned interviews broadly resemble the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

When they were leaked in 1971, the Pentagon Papers caused a sensation by revealing the government had long misled the public about how the United States came to be embroiled in Vietnam.

Bound into 47 volumes, the 7,000-page study was based entirely on internal government documents - diplomatic cables, decision-making memos, intelligence reports. To preserve secrecy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara issued an order prohibiting the authors from interviewing anyone.

SIGAR's Lessons Learned project faced no such restrictions. Staffers carried out the interviews between 2014 and 2018, mostly with officials who served during the Bush and Obama years.

About 30 of the interview records are transcribed, word-for-word accounts. The rest are typed summaries of conversations: pages of notes and quotes from people with different vantage points in the conflict, from provincial outposts to the highest circles of power.

Some of the interviews are inexplicably short. The interview record with John Allen, the Marine general who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013, consists of five paragraphs.

In contrast, records of interviews with other influential figures are much more extensive. Former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker sat for two interviews that yielded 95 transcribed pages.

Unlike the Pentagon Papers, none of the Lessons Learned documents were originally classified as a government secret. Once The Post pushed to make them public, however, other federal agencies intervened and classified some material after the fact.

The State Department, for instance, asserted that releasing portions of certain interviews could jeopardize negotiations with the Taliban to end the war. The Defense Department and Drug Enforcement Administration also classified some interview excerpts.

The Lessons Learned interviews contain few revelations about military operations. But running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective - to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.

Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women's rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.

"With the AfPak strategy there was a present under the Christmas tree for everyone,"Lessons Learned interview | 5/18/2015 Tap to view full document an unidentified U.S. official told government interviewers in 2015. "By the time you were finished you had so many priorities and aspirations it was like no strategy at all."Lessons Learned interview | 5/18/2015 Tap to view full document

The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA's payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn't tell friend from foe.

"They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live,"Lessons Learned interview | 12/15/2017 Tap to view full document an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. "It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: 'But who are the bad guys, where are they?' "Lessons Learned interview | 12/15/2017 Tap to view full document

The view wasn't any clearer from the Pentagon.

"I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,"Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document Rumsfeld complained in a Sept. 8, 2003, snowflake. "We are woefully deficient in human intelligence."Donald Rumsfeld | Rumsfeld memo Tap to view full document

What they said in public Dec. 1, 2009

"The days of providing a blank check are over. . . . It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan."

- President Barack Obama, in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.

On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan - more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was marred from the start.

U.S. officials tried to create - from scratch - a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.

"Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,"Former State Department official | Lessons Learned interview | 7/10/2015 Tap to view full document an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. "The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn't have."Former State Department official | Lessons Learned interview | 7/10/2015 Tap to view full document

Meanwhile, the United States flooded the fragile country with far more aid than it could possibly absorb.

During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.

One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: "We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason."Lessons Learned interview | 10/7/2016 Tap to view full document

Many aid workers blamed Congress for what they saw as a mindless rush to spend.

One unidentified contractor told government interviewers he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county. He once asked a visiting congressman whether the lawmaker could responsibly spend that kind of money back home: "He said hell no. 'Well, sir, that's what you just obligated us to spend and I'm doing it for communities that live in mud huts with no windows.' "Senior USAID official | Lessons Learned interview | 8/15/2016 Tap to view full document

The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers - allies of Washington - plundered with impunity.

Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had "self-organized into a kleptocracy"Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016 Tap to view full document by 2006 - and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy.

"I like to use a cancer analogy,"Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016 Tap to view full document Kolenda told government interviewers. "Petty corruption is like skin cancer; there are ways to deal with it and you'll probably be just fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher level, is like colon cancer; it's worse, but if you catch it in time, you're probably ok. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it's fatal."Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016 Tap to view full document

By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.

"Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption,"Ryan Crocker | Lessons Learned interview | 1/11/2016 Tap to view full document Crocker, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012, told government interviewers. He added, "Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it's somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it."Ryan Crocker | Lessons Learned interview | 1/11/2016 Tap to view full document

What they said in public Sept. 4, 2013

"This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day. And I think that's an important story to be told across the board."

- Then-Army Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, praising the Afghan security forces during a press briefing from Kabul. Milley is now a four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries - paid by U.S. taxpayers - for tens of thousands of "ghost soldiers."

None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

One unidentified U.S. soldier said Special Forces teams "hated"U.S. Special Forces officer | Lessons Learned interview | 9/7/2016 Tap to view full document the Afghan police whom they trained and worked with, calling them "awful - the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel."U.S. Special Forces officer | Lessons Learned interview | 9/7/2016 Tap to view full document

A U.S. military officer estimated that one-third of police recruits were "drug addicts or Taliban."U.S. military officer | Lessons Learned interview | 10/20/2016 Tap to view full document Yet another called them "stealing fools"Victor Glaviano | Lessons Learned interview | 4/11/2017 Tap to view full document who looted so much fuel from U.S. bases that they perpetually smelled of gasoline.

"Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,"Senior USAID official | Lessons Learned interview | 8/15/2016 Tap to view full document an unnamed senior USAID official told government interviewers.

Meanwhile, as U.S. hopes for the Afghan security forces failed to materialize, Afghanistan became the world's leading source of a growing scourge: opium.

The United States has spent about $9 billion to fight the problem over the past 18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating more opium poppies than ever. Last year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82 percent of global opium production, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, former officials said almost everything they did to constrain opium farming backfired.

"We stated that our goal is to establish a 'flourishing market economy,' "Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document said Douglas Lute, the White House's Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. "I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade - this is the only part of the market that's working."Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015 Tap to view full document

From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency.

No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.

"It was a dog's breakfast with no chance of working,"Former senior British official | Lessons Learned interview | 9/21/2016 Tap to view full document an unnamed former senior British official told government interviewers.

The agencies and allies made things worse by embracing a dysfunctional muddle of programs, according to the interviews.

At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops - which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S. government eradicated poppy fields without compensation - which only infuriated farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.

"It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly,"U.S. official | Lessons Learned interview | 5/11/2016 Tap to view full document one U.S. official told government interviewers.

What they said in public Sept. 8, 2008

"Are we losing this war? Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way."

- Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, in a news briefing from Afghanistan

The specter of Vietnam has hovered over Afghanistan from the start.

On Oct. 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing the Taliban, a reporter asked Bush: "Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?"

"We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam," Bush replied confidently. "People often ask me, 'How long will this last?' This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring al-Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail."

In those early days, other U.S. leaders mocked the notion that the nightmare of Vietnam might repeat itself in Afghanistan.

"All together now - quagmire!" Rumsfeld joked at a news conference on Nov. 27, 2001.

But throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam - manipulating public opinion.

In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going - and especially when it is going badly - they emphasize how they are making progress.

For example, some snowflakes that Rumsfeld released with his memoir show he had received a string of unusually dire warnings from the war zone in 2006.

After returning from a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general, reported the Taliban had made an impressive comeback and predicted that "we will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming 24 months."

"The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years - leaving NATO holding the bag - and the whole thing will collapse again into mayhem," McCaffrey wrote in June 2006.

Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said "enormous popular discontent is building" against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.

Yet with Rumsfeld's personal blessing, the Pentagon buried the bleak warnings and told the public a very different story.

In October 2006, Rumsfeld's speechwriters delivered a paper titled "Afghanistan: Five Years Later." Brimming with optimism, it highlighted more than 50 promising facts and figures, from the number of Afghan women trained in "improved poultry management" (more than 19,000) to the "average speed on most roads" (up 300 percent).

"Five years on, there is a multitude of good news," it read. "While it has become fashionable in some circles to call Afghanistan a forgotten war, or to say the United States has lost its focus, the facts belie the myths."

Rumsfeld thought it was brilliant.

"This paper," he wrote in a memo, "is an excellent piece. How do we use it? Should it be an article? An Op-ed piece? A handout? A press briefing? All of the above? I think it ought to get it to a lot of people."

His staffers made sure it did. They circulated a version to reporters and posted it on Pentagon websites.

Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.

"We're making some steady progress," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters in September 2008, even as he and other U.S. commanders in Kabul were urgently requesting reinforcements to cope with a rising tide of Taliban fighters.

Two years later, as the casualty rate among U.S. and NATO troops climbed to another high, Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez held a news conference in Kabul.

"First, we are steadily making deliberate progress," he said.

In March 2011, during congressional hearings, skeptical lawmakers pelted Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, with doubts that the U.S. strategy was working.

"The past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress," Petraeus responded.

One year later, during a visit to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stuck to the same script - even though he had just personally dodged a suicide attack.

"The campaign, as I've pointed out before, I think has made significant progress," Panetta told reporters.

In July 2016, after a surge in Taliban attacks on major cities, Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the time, repeated the refrain.

"We are seeing some progress," he told reporters.

What they said in public March 27, 2009

"Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable."

- Obama, in remarks from the White House

During Vietnam, U.S. military commanders relied on dubious measurements to persuade Americans that they were winning.

Most notoriously, the Pentagon highlighted "body counts," or the number of enemy fighters killed, and inflated the figures as a measurement of success.

In Afghanistan, with occasional exceptions, the U.S. military has generally avoided publicizing body counts. But the Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

"It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,"Senior National Security Council official | Lessons Learned interview | 9/16/2016 Tap to view full document the senior NSC official told government interviewers in 2016. "The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war."

Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban's desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.

"It was their explanations," the senior NSC official said. "For example, attacks are getting worse? 'That's because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.' Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? 'It's because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it's actually an indicator that we're winning.' "

"And this went on and on for two reasons," the senior NSC official said, "to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate."

In other field reports sent up the chain of command, military officers and diplomats took the same line. Regardless of conditions on the ground, they claimed they were making progress.

"From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a great job,"Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, told government interviewers in 2015. "Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?"Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document

Upon arrival in Afghanistan, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were given the same basic mission: to protect the population and defeat the enemy, according to Flynn, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer.

"So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that mission,"Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document said Flynn, who later briefly served as Trump's national security adviser, lost his job in a scandal and was convicted of lying to the FBI. "Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan . . . and say, 'You know what, we didn't accomplish our mission.' "Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document

He added: "So the next guy that shows up finds it [their area] screwed up . . . and then they come back and go, 'Man this is really bad.' "Michael Flynn | Lessons Learned interview | 11/10/2015 Tap to view full document

Bob Crowley, the retired Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers that "truth was rarely welcome"Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document at military headquarters in Kabul.

"Bad news was often stifled,"Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document he said. "There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small - we're running over kids with our MRAPs [armored vehicles] - because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn't welcome."Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016 Tap to view full document

John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results.

"They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop,"John Garofano | Lessons Learned interview | 10/15/2015 Tap to view full document he told government interviewers. "There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this."John Garofano | Lessons Learned interview | 10/15/2015 Tap to view full document

But Garofano said nobody dared to question whether the charts and numbers were credible or meaningful.

"There was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you towards your goal?"John Garofano | Lessons Learned interview | 10/15/2015 Tap to view full document he said. "How do you show this as evidence of success and not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?"John Garofano | Lessons Learned interview | 10/15/2015 Tap to view full document

Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one the U.S. government rarely likes to discuss in public.

"I do think the key benchmark is the one I've suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed," James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. "If the number's going up, you're losing. If the number's going down, you're winning. It's as simple as that."

Last year, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, according to the United Nations.

That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties a decade ago.

If you have information to share about The Afghanistan Papers, contact The Post at afghanpapers@washpost.com.

Were you or one of your family members involved in the Afghanistan war? Tell us about your experiences.
Share your story

Part 1
At war with the truth

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.

Part 2
Stranded without a strategy

Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.

Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in "nation-building," it has wasted billions doing just that

Part 4
Consumed by corruption

The U.S. flooded the country with money - then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled

Part 5
Unguarded nation

Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption

Part 6
Overwhelmed by opium

The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn

Interviews and memos
Explore the documents

Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history

Post Reports
'We didn't know what the task was'

Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

The fight for the documents
About the investigation

It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records

More stories A visual timeline of the war Interviewees respond Share your story about the war

About this story

Design and development by Jake Crump, Armand Emamdjomeh and Matt Callahan. Editing by David Fallis and Jeff Leen. Photo editing, research and document illustration by Nick Kirkpatrick. Graphics by Laris Karklis and Leslie Shapiro. Copy editing by J.J. Evans. Video by Joyce Lee. Senior video production by Tom LeGro. Audio editing by Ted Muldoon. Digital operations by María Sánchez Díez. Audience engagement by Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn and Ric Sanchez. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya.

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office of the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction

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Confidential documents reveal U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan

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The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war By A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

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The World Anti-Doping Agency executive committee handed down the most severe punishment to date in the years-long Russian doping saga, issuing a four-year ban that will bar Russia from competing at the next two Olympic Games. The decision means Russia will have no formal presence at next year’s Summer Games or the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing and will be barred from most major international competition through 2023, including FIFA’s World Cup, the Youth Olympic Games, Paralympics, world championships and other major sporting events subject to World Anti-Doping Code. Similar to the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Russians who have not been implicated in the country’s state-sponsored doping scheme will be allowed to compete in Tokyo as unaffiliated athletes. In PyeongChang, 168 Russians competed as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.”

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The Justice Department inspector general concludes in a report obtained by The Post on Monday that the FBI had an “authorized purpose” to initiate an investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia and that the bureau’s use of confidential informants was in compliance with the rules. The report, which spans more than 400 pages, concludes that the top FBI officials running the Russia investigation were not tainted by political bias and that they had information “sufficient to satisfy the low threshhold” needed to begin investigating several Trump associates in 2016, people familiar with drafts of the document told The Post. The Justice Department inspector general is expected to release the full report later Monday. Lawmakers and staff were allowed to begin reviewing the report ahead of its public release.

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The Justice Department inspector general released his report Monday on the investigation of President Trump's 2016 campaign. (Samuel Corum/AFP/Getty Images)

A Justice Department inspector general's report examining the FBI investigation of President Trump's 2016 campaign rebutted conservatives' accusations that top FBI officials were driven by political bias to illegally spy on Trump advisers but also foundbroad and "serious performance failures" requiring major changes.

The 434-page report issued Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI had an "authorized purpose" when it initiated its investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into the Trump campaign. In doing so, Horowitz implicitly rejected assertions by the president and fellow Republicans that the case was launched out of political animus or that the FBI broke its own rules on using informants.

Read the inspector general's report on the Trump-Russia investigation

As the probe went on and the FBI sought court approval to surveil a former campaign aide, officials repeatedly emphasized damaging information they heard about Trump associates and played down exculpatory evidence they found, the report said. The bureau promptly indicated that it would implement dozens of corrective measures in response to Horowitz's report and that disciplinary action remains a possibility.

Conservatives and liberals alike claimed victory after the report's release - with Republicans asserting that it exposed serious wrongdoing while Democrats said it validated the Russia investigation. Trump called the report's findings "far worse than anything I would have imagined."

"This was an overthrow of government," he said. "This was an attempted overthrow, and a lot of people were in on it, and they got caught, they got caught red-handed."

The report, which was based on more than 1 million documents and more than 170 interviews, is the most exhaustive assessment to date of the investigation that roiled Trump's presidency and would ultimately be overtaken by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. But in the minutes after the document was released, it became clear that the report would not be the last word.

In a statement, Attorney General William P. Barr disagreed with one of the inspector general's key conclusions, saying the FBI launched an investigation of a presidential campaign "on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory."

Post Reports: The fight over the FBI's Russia probe

So, too, did Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Barr handpicked to conduct an investigation similar to that of Horowitz. "Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.," Durham said in a statement. "Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report's conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened."

Durham's investigation is ongoing - and what evidence he has to rebut Horowitz remains unclear. Some involved in the Russia case said they were mystified by his statement.

A draft of the inspector general's report contained a footnote saying Horowitz had asked Durham whether he had evidence to support a right-wing theory that the investigation began as a setup by U.S. intelligence using a Maltese professor to entrap the Trump campaign, according to people who saw the draft. Durham said he did not, the people said. That note about the probe's origins, though, does not appear in the publicly released version of the document. The report has some redactions, but it is unclear if that section was removed or blacked out.

Speaking Monday on MSNBC, former FBI director James B. Comey took aim at Durham, saying he "can't make any sense" of Durham's statement disagreeing with the inspector general and predicting that if the prosecutor does not find information to satisfy Trump, someone will be assigned to investigate him.

"Don't be a part of the sliming of the IG and the department as a whole," Comey said. "Do your work."

Politicians of both parties seized on various portions of the report that supported their long-held views on the Russia probe.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said the inspector general had "completely demolished" some of conservatives' assertions about the origins of the probe, though investigators did find problems. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) noted that Trump had called the case a "hoax" and a "witch hunt," and she said the report "shows that simply isn't the case."

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a strong Trump ally, meanwhile, said, "This is not a good day for the FBI."

"There's more than enough evidence in this report that would suggest a major overhaul in terms of policies and procedures," he said.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said the inspector general's report showed that a previous assessment, authored by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, of the FBI's surveillance activities directed toward the Trump campaign "was accurate and actually understated the FISA abuse the dirty cops engaged in." FISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

'The enigma of the entire Mueller probe': Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

Representatives for those who led the probe and who have become frequent targets of attacks from the president said Horowitz's findings vindicated their clients.

Michael R. Bromwich, a lawyer for former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, noted that the inspector general "found an ample factual basis for the launching of the Russia investigation" and that those errors that were documented "took place at multiple layers below" McCabe.

"Mr. McCabe did not know about any of these issues, and the report makes clear that there is no way he could have known unless someone specifically brought them to his attention," Bromwich said. "The report makes clear that no one did."

Aitan Goelman, a lawyer for former FBI deputy assistant director Peter Strzok, said, "This independent Department of Justice report confirms what everyone who has worked with Pete Strzok already knew - in 25 years of protecting our country, his personal opinions never impacted his work as an official of the FBI."

"Those who recklessly deny this truth for political gain do a grave disservice," he said.

Horowitz was particularly critical of applications the FBI made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, asserting that those applications contained "significant inaccuracies and omissions" and that agents "failed to meet the basic obligation" to ensure the applications were "scrupulously accurate."

The inspector general found that "so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations that was briefed to the highest levels within the FBI," he concluded that there was a failure of "not only the operational team, but also of the managers and supervisors, including senior officials, in the chain of command."

Among those failures was the growing body of information the FBI had gathered suggesting that former British spy Christopher Steele - whose reports were a key element justifying the surveillance of Page - was not as reliable a source as officials had described to the court.

"As the FBI obtained additional information raising significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting, the FBI failed to reassess the Steele reporting relied upon in the FISA applications, and did not fully advise" Justice Department officials of those issues.

Ivanka Trump was friends with former British spy Christopher Steele, according to person familiar with the situation

As a result of those findings, Horowitz has launched a broader audit of FISA work, to study how systemic those problems may be for FISA applications in counterintelligence and counterterrorism cases. He did not, however, conclude that the bureau's applications to monitor Page should have been rejected.

"We do not speculate whether the correction of any particular misstatement or omission, or some combination thereof, would have resulted in a different outcome," the report said. "Nevertheless, the Department's decision-makers and the court should have been given complete and accurate information so that they could meaningfully evaluate probable cause before authorizing the surveillance of a U.S. person associated with a presidential campaign."

The FBI also used informants to surreptitiously record conversations with Trump associates, including one person described in the report as "a high-level Trump campaign official who was not a subject of the investigation."

Agents used informants, also known as confidential human sources, "to interact and consensually record multiple conversations with Page and [former Trump campaign adviser George] Papadopoulos," the report said.

While the inspector general concluded that the FBI followed its procedures regarding investigations, it also recommended that in the future, such sensitive investigations involving major presidential campaigns be more closely supervised by the Justice Department. FBI officials told the inspector general that they heard political information in the course of their work, though one senior official said they considered it "extra crap."

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said the bureau accepts the findings and plans to make a host of changes, including to how it gathers and submits information for surveillance applications.

"I have ordered more than 40 corrective steps to address the Report's recommendations," Wray said in a statement. "Because our credibility and brand are central to fulfilling our mission, we are also making improvements beyond those recommended," adding that the FBI "will not hesitate to take appropriate disciplinary action if warranted at the completion of the required procedures for disciplinary review."

He noted to ABC News, though, that it was "important that the inspector general found that, in this particular instance, the investigation was opened with appropriate predication and authorization."

Justice Dept. watchdog finds political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI's Russia probe but documents errors

The report also took aim at the FBI's handling of a key piece of information about Page: that he had previously provided information to another U.S. agency. The report doesn't identify the agency, but people familiar with the matter said it was the CIA.

Though the agency told the FBI in August that it had a relationship with Page, including in the time frame that the FBI found Page was acting suspiciously, that information was left out of the FISA application, the report said.

In preparation for an application to the FISA court to continue surveillance on Page, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith forwarded to an FBI agent a prior email from a CIA liaison, but Clinesmith added the words "not a source" to the liaison's email, making it appear that the liaison had denied that Page was a source for the CIA, the report said. That conduct is now being investigated as a possible crime by Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, according to people familiar with the matter."

The inspector general also found instances of Page and Papadopoulos making exculpatory statements to FBI informants, but those were not provided to the lawyers overseeing the Page surveillance. At one point, Papadopoulos told an FBI informant that the Trump campaign "of course, [does not] advocate for this type of activity because at the end of the day it's . . . illegal" and that "our campaign is not . . . engag[ing] or reaching out to WikiLeaks or to the whoever it is to tell them please work with us, collaborate because we don't, no one does that." The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks obtained and published stolen emails damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign, a subject of intense interest within Trump's campaign.

Another key finding by the inspector general is that the FBI used a national security briefing to the Trump campaign in August 2016 to try to further its collusion investigation. The FBI provides intelligence briefings to major-party candidates to warn them about the risks posed by foreign intelligence operatives, but in this case, the briefing had a secondary, unstated purpose: to put an agent working on the Russia collusion investigation in the room with Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and report back on what Flynn said.

"The FBI's use of this briefing for investigative reasons could potentially interfere with the expectation of trust and good faith among participants in strategic intelligence briefings," the report concluded.

Horowitz is scheduled to discuss his findings Wednesday during a public hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated incorrectly that an FBI lawyer sent an altered email to a Justice Department lawyer. The altered email was sent to an FBI agent.

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FBI was justified in opening Trump campaign probe, but case plagued by 'serious failures,' inspector general finds

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A Justice Department inspector general's report examining the FBI investigation of President Trump's 2016 campaign rebutted conservatives' accusations that top FBI officials were driven by political bias to illegally spy on Trump advisers but also foundbroad and "serious performance failures" requiring major changes.

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Pete Frates, the man whose battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease helped spark the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, died Dec. 9 at his home in Massachusetts. He was 34. Frates was celebrated around the world for popularizing the movement, which raised more than $200 million for efforts to fight the disease. “Pete was an inspiration to so many people around the world who drew strength from his courage and resiliency,” Frates’s family said in a statement. Frates, a former Boston College athlete, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2012, when he was 27. The disease, which gets its colloquial name from the former New York Yankees great who suffered from it, causes neurons in the spinal cord and brain to die, eventually leading to paralysis and death. It has no known cure. The ice bucket challenge took off in the summer of 2014, after Frates and his family started daring each other to dump ice water on their heads to raise awareness about the disease.

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In 2015, Boston Red Sox player Mike Napoli takes part in the Ice Bucket Challenge with Pete Frates, right. (Arthur Pollock/The Boston Herald via AP)

Pete Frates, the former college baseball captain whose battle with Lou Gehrig's disease helped spark a global fundraising movement to find a cure for the fatal neurological disorder, died Dec. 9 at his home in Massachusetts. He was 34.

Frates was celebrated around the world for popularizing the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised more than $200 million for efforts to fight the disease. The viral challenge involved people posting videos of themselves dumping buckets of ice water on their heads and making a donation to charity.

"Pete was an inspiration to so many people around the world who drew strength from his courage and resiliency," Frates's family said in a statement.

"A natural born leader and the ultimate teammate, Pete was a role model for all, especially young athletes, who looked up to him for his bravery and unwavering positive spirit in the face of adversity," the family said. "He was a noble fighter who inspired us all to use our talents and strengths in the service of others."

Frates was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2012, when he was 27. The disease, which gets its colloquial name from the former New York Yankees great who suffered from it, causes neurons in the spinal cord and brain to die, eventually leading to paralysis and death. It has no known cure.

The ice bucket challenge took off in the summer of 2014, after Frates and his family started daring each other to dump ice water on their heads to raise awareness about the disease.

It's possible that someone else invented the challenge, but Frates became its unrivaled living symbol almost overnight. He told the Boston Globe at the time that he got the idea from Patrick Quinn, another ALS patient. The pair met online, and Quinn would stop to visit Frates when he traveled to Boston for medical treatments.

Videos of people soaking themselves for the cause proliferated on social media that summer, drawing billions of views around the world. Scores of celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James joined in the effort. Donations to ALS groups poured in.

"The ALS ice bucket challenge represents all that's great about this country - it's about fun, friends, family, and it makes a difference to all of us living with ALS," Frates said at the time.

The outpouring of support stunned the president of the ALS Association, who said that the organization had "never seen anything like this in the history of the disease."

Frates "changed the trajectory of ALS forever and showed the world how to live with a fatal disease," the ALS Association said in a statement Monday. "His efforts to lead the Ice Bucket Challenge had a significant impact on the search for treatments and a cure for ALS."

Frates was born Dec. 28, 1984, in Beverly, Mass. After graduating from St. John's Prep School, he played baseball at Boston College, where he studied communications, and went on to play baseball professionally and in amateur leagues.

He discovered he had Lou Gehrig's disease in 2012, after a he got hit on the wrist by a pitch and the injury didn't heal properly, according to the Associated Press.

Two years later, Frates was almost completely immobilized by the disease, unable to speak or walk. He communicated by writing with the help of a tool that allowed him to choose a letter by looking at it on a keyboard.

Throughout the ordeal, Frates and his family remained relentlessly positive.

"Pete never complained about his illness," his family said Monday. "Instead, he saw it as an opportunity to give hope to other patients and their families."

Frates told the Globe in 2014 that the birth of his daughter, Lucy, was one of the things that kept him going as his condition worsened.

"The thought of seeing the face of our first child and knowing that I am a father is a moment I will cherish beyond words," he said. "I may not know how many years I have left, but I will fight harder and harder each day to be there as a father and a husband."

Frates is survived by his wife, Julie, and their daughter; his parents; a brother; and a sister.

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Pete Frates, who helped inspire the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, dies at 34

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Pete Frates, the former college baseball captain whose battle with Lou Gehrig's disease helped spark a global fundraising movement to find a cure for the fatal neurological disorder, died Dec. 9 at his home in Massachusetts. He was 34.

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George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all promised the same thing: The United States would not get stuck with the burden of “nation-building” in Afghanistan. Yet nation-building is exactly what the United States has tried to do in war-battered Afghanistan — on a colossal scale. Since 2001, Washington has spent more on nation-building in Afghanistan than in any country ever, allocating $133 billion for reconstruction, aid programs and the Afghan security forces. The exorbitant nation-building project for Afghanistan went awry from the start and grew worse as the war dragged on, according to a trove of confidential government interviews in documents obtained by The Post. Instead of bringing stability and peace, those interviewed said, the United States inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that remains dependent on U.S. military power for its survival. Assuming it does not collapse, U.S. officials have said it will need billions more dollars in aid annually, for decades.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is back on his white horse, in knee-high virgin snow on a sacred mountain, state media announced Wednesday, as Pyongyang foreshadowed a major policy decision later this month. The images of Kim were high on symbolism. Mount Paektu is enshrined in North Korean revolutionary myth as the birthplace of Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, and a key military base for his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, during the struggle against Japanese colonial rule. The third-generation leader’s visit to the peak read like an attempt to burnish his leadership credentials and prepare the country for a policy shift. Previous visits to the mountain have come before major decisions.

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Kim Jong Un tours battle sites on horseback around Mount Paektu, on the North Korea-China border, in this photo released Wednesday by North Korean state media. (Korean Central News Agency via KNS/AFP via Getty Images)

TOKYO - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is back on his white horse, inspecting "revolutionary battle sites" in knee-high virgin snow on a sacred mountain, state media announced Wednesday, as Pyongyang foreshadowed a major policy decision later this month.

The images of Kim on horseback, returning to Mount Paektu after a similar visit in October, were high on symbolism. But it was a second, more dryly worded announcement on Wednesday that was at least as significant.

The Presidium of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea decided to convene the fifth plenary meeting of the 7th Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea in the latter part of December, the Korean Central News Agency said, "to discuss and decide on crucial issues in line with the needs of the development of the Korean revolution and the changed situation at home and abroad."

Put simply, after giving the United States until the end of the year to change its approach to denuclearization talks and warning that North Korea would follow a "new path," Kim appears to have made his decision on what that path should be, experts said.

Kim announced a halt to nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests in April 2018 as North Korea and the United States pursued diplomacy. But his regime warned last month that there was no reason to stick to previous commitments, saying Pyongyang felt "betrayed" by a U.S. decision to continue with joint air drills with South Korea.Although the United States later postponed the drill, the bellicose North Korean rhetoric has continued.

Cheong Seong-Chang, a North Korea specialist at South Korea's Sejong Institute, said the announcements taken together did not bode well for relations with Washington.

"Kim Jong Un is displaying strong hostility and a strong will to resist the United States in order to gather support ahead of announcing the 'new path,' " he said. "The party plenum is likely to see a strong criticism against the United States and South Korea. North Korea is highly likely to announce the discontinuation of nuclear talks and the establishment of North Korea's status as a nuclear power."

Ankit Panda, a North Korea expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said a Workers' Party plenum was more significant than Kim's much anticipated New Year's Day speech. The last plenum took place in April, when Kim called on the United States to make a "bold decision" while threatening to put his country on a "new path."

"Presumably, we'll now learn what happens next," he tweeted, suggesting important new policy guidance, with the possibility that may involve a return to the byungjin policy of simultaneous military and economic development.

Kim Jong Un is into process/ institutionalized power, much more than his pops anyway.
He appears to have made a decision. Ran it through Presidium [akin to Politburo Standing Committee]. Calling a "Christmas Plenum" of Central Committee to ratify it. pic.twitter.com/xNxsFH0SZm
- John Delury (@JohnDelury) December 4, 2019

On Tuesday, North Korea warned that time was running out before its year-end deadline and threatened an unwelcome Christmas gift for the United States, but experts said its decision may have already been made.

"The door has closed. We're just waiting to learn exactly what has been decided," Panda tweeted.

Later Wednesday, North Korea responded angrily to President Trump's comments from the previous day, in which he said the United States would use military force against the North if needed.

Pak Jong Chon, chief of the General Staff of the Korean People's Army, said he was disappointed by the remarks. "The Supreme Commander of our armed forces was also displeased to hear it," he said, in a statement carried by KCNA, referring to Kim.

Pak warned that all-out armed conflict could recommence between the two countries at any time, even by accident, and warned that the use of armed forces against North Korea "will be a horrible thing" for the United States.

Kim Jong Un rides white horse on sacred mountain - and plans 'great operation'

Mount Paektu is enshrined in North Korean revolutionary myth as the birthplace of Kim's father, Kim Jong Il, and a key military base for his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, during the struggle against Japanese colonial rule. The third-generation leader's visit to the peak read like an attempt to burnish his leadership credentials and prepare the country for a policy shift. Previous visits to the mountain have come before major decisions.

"It is of remarkable historic significance that Kim Jong Un, the great leader of our revolution who opens up the period of a great leap for the development of the revolution, personally left the sacred trace in the revolutionary battle sites in [the Mount] Paektu area, the source of the lifeline of the revolution and inexhaustible patriotism, through knee-high virgin snow," KCNA reported.

Kim said his tour had "hardened his resolution to defend the gains of the revolution."

He said that Korean people needed to have a proper understanding of the "revolutionary traditions" of Mount Paektu and that this would help them "demonstrate the country's dignity and honor before the world."

This spirit, he added, would enable them to overcome "the unprecedented blockade and pressure imposed by the imperialists" and help them "get prepared for the harshness and protracted character of our revolution."

Kim reported from Seoul.

North Korea warns United States of an unwelcome 'Christmas gift'

North Korea launches two projectiles in Thanksgiving message to Trump

In South Korea, military cost dispute and Trump's moves in Syria fuel doubts over U.S. commitment

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

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Kim Jong Un is back on his white horse, as North Korea flags a big decision

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TOKYO - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is back on his white horse, inspecting "revolutionary battle sites" in knee-high virgin snow on a sacred mountain, state media announced Wednesday, as Pyongyang foreshadowed a major policy decision later this month. The images of Kim on horseback, returning to Mount Paektu after a similar visit in October, were high on symbolism.

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The world has lost another year in the quest to finally start reducing its carbon emissions, which scientists say is crucial to avoid the steadily worsening impacts of climate change. Global greenhouse gas emissions are projected to grow slightly during 2019, reaching another record high, according to a new analysis published Tuesday. The report from the Global Carbon Project makes clear that the transformation necessary to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions is nowhere in sight. Global emissions have risen for three consecutive years, at a time when they should be starting to drop sharply if the world is to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The world has lost another year in the quest to finally start reducing its carbon emissions, which scientists say is crucial to avoid the steadily worsening impacts of climate change.

Instead of beginning a long-awaited decline, global greenhouse gas emissions are projected to grow slightly during 2019, reaching another record high, according to a new analysis published Tuesday. Total carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry totaled 36.8 billion tons, according to an estimate from the Global Carbon Project, an academic consortium that produces the figures annually. That represents a 0.6 percent increase from 2018, which until now stood as the record.

"We're blowing through our carbon budget the way an addict blows through cash," Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth science at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, said in an interview. "It's troubling, because carbon dioxide pollution is higher than it's ever been."

Global emissions have risen for three consecutive years, at a time when they should be starting to drop sharply if the world is to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

The news of still-growing greenhouse gas emissions is the latest in a drumbeat of negative findings that come as world leaders gather in Madrid for an annual climate change conference, where they face mounting pressure to alter the current trajectory.

Last week, a bleak report from the U.N. Environment Program detailed how off-target the world remains in its collective goal of limiting the Earth's warming. It said global emissions must fall by nearly 8 percent per year over the next decade to stay in line with the goal of limiting warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

A slower pace of cuts of about 3 percent per year would keep the world on track for around 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100 - a level of warming that would have severe consequences, including the death of nearly all coral reefs and the possible destabilization of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

The globe already has warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century, according to separate findings published Tuesday by the World Meteorological Organization.

The WMO also found that 2019 "concludes a decade of exceptional global heat, retreating ice and record sea levels driven by greenhouse gases from human activities," and added that this year is on pace to be the second- or third-warmest on record.

Tuesday's report from the Global Carbon Project, published in several journals, including Environmental Research Letters, makes clear that the transformation necessary to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions is nowhere in sight.

But the findings were not entirely negative.

U.S. emissions are projected to fall 1.7 percent in 2019 after rising the previous year, as coal is steadily displaced by natural gas and renewable energy. U.S. coal burning is projected to have fallen 11 percent in 2019 alone. Emissions in the European Union are expected to decline at a similar rate, as nations there also move away from coal.

"We're not in the same position we were five or 10 years ago," Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia and a member of the team that published Tuesday's figures, said in an interview. "We have demonstrated that making these investments [in renewable energy] do pay off, that emissions can go down."

Le Quéré noted that not long ago, global emissions routinely grew by 2 to 3 percent each year, a rate that appears to have slowed. But, she added, "Emissions, at the end of the day, need to decrease to zero."

While emissions fell in the United States and Europe during 2019, they are projected to have grown in China (by 2.6 percent), India (1.8 percent) and the rest of the world (by 0.5 percent).

The Global Carbon Project found, meanwhile, that the burning of natural gas is booming, growing by an additional 2.6 percent this year after strong growth last year. Petroleum use in automobiles, airplanes and other vehicles continues to increase around the globe.

In China, the world's largest consumer of coal, natural gas burning grew by nearly 10 percent in 2019 and petroleum use jumped nearly 7 percent, according to the projection.

These trends are being driven by multiple factors, researchers said, including growing supplies of liquefied natural gas; increasing vehicle ownership, especially in India and China; and ongoing global economic growth, which traditionally creates greater energy demand.

Deforestation and other forms of land use during 2019 also contributed to the human-caused emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases. The Global Carbon Project said wildfires in the Amazon and elsewhere helped drive land-use emissions to 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide - an increase over 2018 levels. The net result is that the world is projected to have produced 43 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions from all sources in 2019.

While some of that gas will be absorbed into the oceans and some will be consumed by plants, much will linger in the atmosphere, strengthening the greenhouse effect.

Researchers are able to estimate annual fossil fuel emissions before the year is even over by monitoring official government reports on fossil fuel production, imports and consumption in China, the world's largest emitter. A similar method is used for India. For the rest of the world, the 2019 estimate is based on the linkage between emissions and economic growth rates. For the United States, the group adopts the official projection of the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The estimate of 0.6 percent emissions growth also comes with some uncertainty. The actual number, researchers said, could be a slight emissions decline of 0.2 percent, or an emissions rise as high as 1.5 percent.

Jackson said a faster shift toward cleaner energy could create new jobs, improve national security and have measurable public health benefits. But he also said it would leave a better legacy than the one of inaction on climate change that has defined recent years.

"It's another lost year, another lost decade," he said of the trend of rising global emissions. "I don't want to belittle the important things that have happened and are happening, but they are not enough. People will look back at us and wonder, 'What were you doing?' "

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Global greenhouse gas emissions will hit yet another record high this year, experts project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world has lost another year in the quest to finally start reducing its carbon emissions, which scientists say is crucial to avoid the steadily worsening impacts of climate change. Instead of beginning a long-awaited decline, global greenhouse gas emissions are projected to grow slightly during 2019, reaching another record high, according to a new analysis published Tuesday.

# data[].attributes.body
The world has lost another year in the quest to finally start reducing its carbon emissions, which scientists say is crucial to avoid the steadily worsening impacts of climate change. Global greenhouse gas emissions are projected to grow slightly during 2019, reaching another record high, according to a new analysis published Tuesday. The report from the Global Carbon Project makes clear that the transformation necessary to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions is nowhere in sight. Global emissions have risen for three consecutive years, at a time when they should be starting to drop sharply if the world is to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The world has lost another year in the quest to finally start reducing its carbon emissions, which scientists say is crucial to avoid the steadily worsening impacts of climate change.

Instead of beginning a long-awaited decline, global greenhouse gas emissions are projected to grow slightly during 2019, reaching another record high, according to a new analysis published Tuesday. Total carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry totaled 36.8 billion tons, according to an estimate from the Global Carbon Project, an academic consortium that produces the figures annually. That represents a 0.6 percent increase from 2018, which until now stood as the record.

"We're blowing through our carbon budget the way an addict blows through cash," Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth science at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, said in an interview. "It's troubling, because carbon dioxide pollution is higher than it's ever been."

Global emissions have risen for three consecutive years, at a time when they should be starting to drop sharply if the world is to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

The news of still-growing greenhouse gas emissions is the latest in a drumbeat of negative findings that come as world leaders gather in Madrid for an annual climate change conference, where they face mounting pressure to alter the current trajectory.

Last week, a bleak report from the U.N. Environment Program detailed how off-target the world remains in its collective goal of limiting the Earth's warming. It said global emissions must fall by nearly 8 percent per year over the next decade to stay in line with the goal of limiting warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

A slower pace of cuts of about 3 percent per year would keep the world on track for around 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100 - a level of warming that would have severe consequences, including the death of nearly all coral reefs and the possible destabilization of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

The globe already has warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century, according to separate findings published Tuesday by the World Meteorological Organization.

The WMO also found that 2019 "concludes a decade of exceptional global heat, retreating ice and record sea levels driven by greenhouse gases from human activities," and added that this year is on pace to be the second- or third-warmest on record.

Tuesday's report from the Global Carbon Project, published in several journals, including Environmental Research Letters, makes clear that the transformation necessary to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions is nowhere in sight.

But the findings were not entirely negative.

U.S. emissions are projected to fall 1.7 percent in 2019 after rising the previous year, as coal is steadily displaced by natural gas and renewable energy. U.S. coal burning is projected to have fallen 11 percent in 2019 alone. Emissions in the European Union are expected to decline at a similar rate, as nations there also move away from coal.

"We're not in the same position we were five or 10 years ago," Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia and a member of the team that published Tuesday's figures, said in an interview. "We have demonstrated that making these investments [in renewable energy] do pay off, that emissions can go down."

Le Quéré noted that not long ago, global emissions routinely grew by 2 to 3 percent each year, a rate that appears to have slowed. But, she added, "Emissions, at the end of the day, need to decrease to zero."

While emissions fell in the United States and Europe during 2019, they are projected to have grown in China (by 2.6 percent), India (1.8 percent) and the rest of the world (by 0.5 percent).

The Global Carbon Project found, meanwhile, that the burning of natural gas is booming, growing by an additional 2.6 percent this year after strong growth last year. Petroleum use in automobiles, airplanes and other vehicles continues to increase around the globe.

In China, the world's largest consumer of coal, natural gas burning grew by nearly 10 percent in 2019 and petroleum use jumped nearly 7 percent, according to the projection.

These trends are being driven by multiple factors, researchers said, including growing supplies of liquefied natural gas; increasing vehicle ownership, especially in India and China; and ongoing global economic growth, which traditionally creates greater energy demand.

Deforestation and other forms of land use during 2019 also contributed to the human-caused emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases. The Global Carbon Project said wildfires in the Amazon and elsewhere helped drive land-use emissions to 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide - an increase over 2018 levels. The net result is that the world is projected to have produced 43 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions from all sources in 2019.

While some of that gas will be absorbed into the oceans and some will be consumed by plants, much will linger in the atmosphere, strengthening the greenhouse effect.

Researchers are able to estimate annual fossil fuel emissions before the year is even over by monitoring official government reports on fossil fuel production, imports and consumption in China, the world's largest emitter. A similar method is used for India. For the rest of the world, the 2019 estimate is based on the linkage between emissions and economic growth rates. For the United States, the group adopts the official projection of the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The estimate of 0.6 percent emissions growth also comes with some uncertainty. The actual number, researchers said, could be a slight emissions decline of 0.2 percent, or an emissions rise as high as 1.5 percent.

Jackson said a faster shift toward cleaner energy could create new jobs, improve national security and have measurable public health benefits. But he also said it would leave a better legacy than the one of inaction on climate change that has defined recent years.

"It's another lost year, another lost decade," he said of the trend of rising global emissions. "I don't want to belittle the important things that have happened and are happening, but they are not enough. People will look back at us and wonder, 'What were you doing?' "

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Global greenhouse gas emissions will hit yet another record high this year, experts project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world has lost another year in the quest to finally start reducing its carbon emissions, which scientists say is crucial to avoid the steadily worsening impacts of climate change. Instead of beginning a long-awaited decline, global greenhouse gas emissions are projected to grow slightly during 2019, reaching another record high, according to a new analysis published Tuesday.

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The Yareta or llareta, bright green blobs that resemble moss-covered boulders, are actually flowering shrubs perfectly designed to withstand the high-altitude conditions of the Andes Mountains in Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and western Argentina. The largest shrubs are approximately 3,000 years old.⁣
⁣
Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California, is the oldest single tree on Earth at the ripe old age of about 5,000, making it the oldest known non-cloned organism on Earth. Its exact location is a guarded secret, but hikers can wander by its ancient peers.⁣
⁣
A sprawling sea grass meadow 10 miles long near Spain ranks as the oldest known single organism on Earth, according to geneticists. One patch is estimated at 200,000 years old.⁣

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(CNN) - Who needs new and improved when you can delight in old and perfected?

Planet ramblers looking for adventure might consider spending time with these 10 living ambassadors from the past, including a bird with millions of flight miles, a rose that survived an aerial bombing, a tree linked to Buddha, green globules in the Andes and massive poriferans inAntarctica.

These and other amazing paleo-pilgrimages await the dedicated traveler.

Wisdom, the world's oldest confirmed bird in the wild, turned at least 68 this year. Since she was banded in 1956, the Laysan albatross has logged more than three million flight miles, six times the distance to the moon and back!

In between oceanic migrations, the frequent flier returns in the autumn to the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to raise her chicks. She's survived a tsunami and hatched an estimated 30 to 40 eggs on the island.

With persistence and permits, one can see Wisdom and her fellow Phoebastria immutabilis on their Pacific paradise. Midway Atoll is located on the far northern end of the Hawaiian archipelago.

Jonathan, the most beloved resident of St. Helena, a tiny island in the South Atlantic, was born about 1832, five years before the coronation of Queen Victoria. Since then, the giant tortoise has lived through 39 US presidents.

He never met the other notable to live in the island, Napoleon, as the French emperor died in exile there in 1821. The gentle reptilian giant originated from the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, but made the move to the Atlantic as a gift to the then-governor of St. Helena in 1882.

Since then he's roamed about the governor's grand island estate, where he enjoys the company of three other giant tortoises and frequent human guests.

Celebrated as the Thousand Year Rose, a towering rose bush in Germany is thought to have been established by King Louis the Pious in 815.

The bush grows alongside a Catholic cathedral dedicated to St. Mary in Hildesheim, a beautiful medieval village noted for its ancient churches.

Besides beauty and age, the plant exhibits remarkable fortitude. Allied bombing during World War II left the cathedral in ruins, but the rose, a Rosa canina, also known as the dog rose, somehow survived, flourished and now grows more than 30 feet high next to the apse of the restored church.

Visit anytime, but late May and early June are the best times to see the delicate pink blossoms.

The fig tree under which Siddhartha Gautama experienced enlightenment in India is long gone, but a cutting from it, carried by a royal devotee to Sri Lanka around 250 BCE, give or take a few decades, has grown into one of the most revered trees in the Buddhist world, and the oldest known tree with a planting recorded in history.

Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, Ficus religiosa, has welcomed the religious, the curious and the nefarious in the centuries since.

H.G. Wells marveled at it. Elephants damaged it. Tamil separatists besieged it.

Today, pilgrims of all kinds pay homage, especially on full moon (poya) days, to the tree, which sits among elaborate gardens, canals, golden fences, religious stupas and younger Bodhi trees in theMahamewna Gardens in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka.

Whether planted by man or nature, between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, before the rise of Classical Greece, a seed sprouted on the Mediterranean island of Crete that to this day produces a yearly crop of olives.

But the monumental tree in the village of Vouves does more than make drupe fruit. It and other ancient Olea europaea nearby, similar in wizened age and appearance, attract artists, religious leaders, Olympians and heads of state, inspired by their strikingly gnarly trunks and limbs.

The Vouves tree now features a museum highlighting the traditional olive harvesting techniques of Crete, once the seat of the Minoan civilization, which flourished in antiquity from its olive oil trade.

The Yareta or llareta, bright green blobs that resemble moss-covered boulders, are actually flowering shrubs perfectly designed to withstand the high-altitude conditions of the Andes Mountains in Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and western Argentina.

Wind, freezing temperatures and drought prove no match for Azorella compacta, a wild, inedible relative of parsley and fennel, which slowly and methodically ekes out an existence, growing as little as one meter a century.

Because of their slow growth rate, the largest shrubs are thought to be approximately 3,000 years old.

Given their density -- a shrub can easily support the weight of a human -- Yareta have been used like peat as a traditional fuel. Fortunately, South American governments have rallied to protect the endangered species.

Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California, stands at the ripe old age of about 5,000, making it the oldest known non-cloned organism on Earth.

Named for an Old Testament figure who lived 969 years, the Pinus longaeva's exact whereabouts remain a closely guarded scientific secret, but you can wander by its ancient peers and perhaps the very tree itself on a 4.5-mile hiking loop through the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest within Inyo National Forest.

Whether one stumbles upon the most ancient one or not, this grove of grizzled knotted pines -- many older than the Egyptian pyramids, clinging to sheer arid mountains that jut from the desert floor -- inspires no less.

The volcano sponges of Antarctica, Anoxycalyx joubini, are whitish blobs that resemble giant beer barrels or miniature volcanoes. They pepper the chilly waters around McMurdo Sound and their estimated age is based on the sheer size of the sponges, which only grow a tiny bit each year.

They thrive in depths from 50 to 500 feet, sentinels of a deep realm they share with other strange creatures, like tiny crustaceans and wiggly worms that live inside the sponges, and packs of pin-cushioned sea stars that dine on the two-meter-tall monsters.

Only the most dedicated scuba divers can explore this realm. Thanks to extreme ocean outfitters such as Polar Trec, they can -- enjoying, after drilling through the ice, some of the best underwater visibility in the world.

The Trembling Giant of Utah consists of almost 50,000 quaking aspen trees, but the entire grove of Populus tremuloides is genetically identical and shares a single root system, making it technically a single organism.

This clonal colony of an individual male is also known as Pando, Latin for "I Spread Out," which it sure does, covering more than 100 acres.

The leaves of one quaking aspen make quite a flutter in the gentlest of wind. Listen to the tuneful effect times tens of thousands as you overnight, right in Pando's heart, in a campground in Fishlake National Forest.

A sprawling sea grass meadow ten miles long near Spain ranks as the oldest known single organism on Earth, according to geneticists.

Posidonia oceanica, known as Neptune's grass, is endemic to the Mediterranean Sea. But a patch near the island of Formentera, self-cloned like Pando, stands out for its age, estimated at 200,000 years.

Fortunately the island, the smallest of Spain's Balearics, doesn't have the crowds of nearby Ibiza, from where one catches the ferry to Formentera. Besides taking a scuba or snorkeling adventure to the ancient sea forest, one can explore the island's scenic lighthouse and caves.

Richard Stenger, a former senior CNN.com sci-tech editor, currently travels the physical and virtual worlds from his home base in Northern California, where he serves as chief marketing ranger for RedwoodCoastParks.com.

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where to see the oldest living things on earth - cnn

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Where to see the oldest living things on Earth

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(CNN) - Who needs new and improved when you can delight in old and perfected? Planet ramblers looking for adventure might consider spending time with these 10 living ambassadors from the past, including a bird with millions of flight miles, a rose that survived an aerial bombing, a tree linked to Buddha, green globules in the Andes and massive poriferans inAntarctica.

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Rosa Parks was honored with a new statue in Montgomery, Alabama, 64 years after she was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a city bus. December 1 marked the second annual Rosa Parks Day in Alabama, after the state legislature approved the honor for the civil rights icon last year. "She was a consummate contributor to equality and did so with a quiet humility that is an example for all of us,” said Mayor Steven Reed, the city's first African American mayor. Parks was on her way home from work on December 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her seat on a public bus for a white man. Her subsequent arrest prompted the 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system, organized by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

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rosa parks day: civil rights icon recognized with new statue in alabama - cnn

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Rosa Parks honored with a statue in Montgomery, Alabama

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Rosa Parks will be honored with a new statue in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, on Sunday, 64 years to the day she was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a city bus.

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Matthew Shepard, whose brutal murder in 1998 sparked outrage and galvanized the LGTBQ movement, was honored Tuesday with a memorial plaque installed at the Washington National Cathedral. Last year, his remains were interred at the church, which is known for its historic inclusion of LGBTQ people. Shepard was a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming when he was robbed, beaten and left tied to a fence by two men who targeted him because he was gay. “People around the world gave generously to make this memorial possible,” said Shepard's mother, who is pictured above with his father. “We hope this will be a place that forever offers solace and strength for all who visit.”

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a plaque dedicated to matthew shepard installed at washington national cathedral  - cnn

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A plaque dedicated to Matthew Shepard installed at Washington National Cathedral

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Matthew Shepard died in 1998 after one of the most notorious and brutal anti-gay crimes in the US. Two decades later, he is being honored through a memorial plaque installed at the Washington National Cathedral.

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi asked Congress to proceed with articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. "The President leaves us no choice but to act because he is trying to corrupt once again the election for his own benefit," Pelosi said during her press conference. The speaker's announcement is the clearest signal yet that Democrats are moving swiftly to impeach the President before Christmas.⁣
⁣
𝗪𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭:⁣
▪️ The House Judiciary Committee has authority to write articles of impeachment, and will vote on whether to refer them to the full House.⁣
▪️ If they're approved, they'll go to the House floor, where a simple majority is needed to formally impeach President Trump.⁣
▪️ If Trump is impeached, the Senate will hold a trial to decide if he should be removed from office. A two-thirds majority is required to convict and remove a president from office.⁣

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articles of impeachment: nancy pelosi says 'no choice' but to move forward - cnnpolitics

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Pelosi: 'No choice' but to move forward with articles of impeachment

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday the House was proceeding with articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, a historic step that is likely to make Trump the third President in US history to be impeached.

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Winds have blown smoke from Australia's bushfires toward New Zealand, and particles have turned the snow on some glaciers red and pink, CNN meteorologist Monica Garrett says. It is not possible to know for sure what material it is until it's tested, Garrett said, but given the conditions of the past few months, it is safe to assume that the discoloration is from the Australia fires. These dramatic images were snapped by a travel photographer, who described the scene as "shocking" and "bizarre." While it's too early to say exactly how the particles will affect the glaciers, scientists have found that forest fires in the Amazon have caused glaciers in the Andes mountains to melt faster.

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new zealand's glaciers are turning red - and it's because of australia's bushfires - cnn

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New Zealand's glaciers are turning red - and it's because of Australia's bushfires

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One of the most startling consequences of the bushfires that are still raging across Australia, is that they have turned some of New Zealand's famed glaciers red and pink.

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A few days after Veronika Didusenko was crowned Miss Ukraine, the beauty pageant revoked her title for having a child and having been married. Now, Didusenko is taking legal action against the Miss World organization, alleging that its rules are discriminatory. The pageant said the disqualification is because Didusenko “provided false information” by signing an agreement stating that she had never been married and did not have children, which are among the competition’s requirements. While Didusenko admitted to reporting false information, she said those rules are outdated. “It’s not about the crown,” she told CNN. “It’s about the rules and the discriminatory policies which Miss World has now in the 21st century.”

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Veronika Didusenko had only been Miss Ukraine for a few days before she was stripped of her title for having a child and having been married.

Now, the model is taking legal action against the UK-based Miss World organization, which determines the rules for affiliate pageants like Miss Ukraine, alleging that its rules are discriminatory.

"The Equality Act (2010) protects against discrimination on the basis of certain protected characteristics, including marriage, maternity and sex," British human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, who is representing Didusenko, said in a statement.

"The reason Veronika was not allowed to compete in Miss World is because she was married and had a child. Quite simply, denying her the chance of competing on those bases would seem to breach those protections against discrimination."

Soon after Didusenko was crowned Miss Ukraine in September 2018, the national beauty pageant announced she would be disqualified from competing in Miss World, and that it would revoke her title.

The pageant said Didusenko "provided false information" by signing an agreement stating that she had never been married and did not have children, which are among the requirements for participating in the competition.

While Didusenko did admit to reporting false information, she said the rules barring mothers and previously married women are "so archaic, so outdated, so old-fashioned."

After losing her title, Didusenko launched a global campaign called #RightToBeAMother and spent a year building a coalition of support, with the goal of getting Miss World to change its rules and allow all women to participate in its beauty pageants.

"It's not about the crown," she told CNN. "It's about the rules and the discriminatory policies which Miss World has now in the 21st century."

Miss World says the rules about marriage and children are in place because holding the title of Miss World is a demanding task.

"The rules under which Miss World operates are constantly under review," Miss World said in part in a statement. "The rules are set with the principal aim of finding a Miss World who is free and able to commit, often at short notice, to travel globally in support of the sick and disadvantaged which may be for long periods of time, often to areas devastated by natural disasters."

But Didusenko said it's "patronizing" for Miss World to suggest that a woman would be unable to fulfill the obligations of the title simply because they have a partner or a child.

"It's not up to Miss World to decide my ability to balance career and parenting," she said.

CNN was unable to immediately reach Miss World for further comment, but Miss World chairman Julia Morley attributed the rules to cultural sensitivity on Good Morning Britain in December 2018.

"When you're trying to get a worldwide organization to agree, you have to look to everyone, and they vote as to what is acceptable," Morley said.

"Whatever I feel, or whatever Europe feels, is one thing. What the rest of the world may feel, when they've got to look at their various religions, various things, if you can understand that we don't just have our own feelings, we have to consider others."

But Didusenko and her lawyers say that reasoning isn't good enough.

"I don't want the crown back. I want to get the rules changed for wider society," she wrote in an Instagram post. "These rules are a systemic, widespread and international policy that results in discrimination on large scale across many countries.

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a ukrainian model was disqualified from miss world for being a mother. now she's pushing back - cnn

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A model was disqualified from Miss World for being a mother. Now she's pushing back

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Veronika Didusenko had only been Miss Ukraine for a few days before she was stripped of her title for having a child and having been married. Now, the model is taking legal action against the UK-based Miss World organization, which determines the rules for affiliate pageants like Miss Ukraine, alleging that its rules are discriminatory.

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A firefighter in Australia filmed the shocking moment a bushfire erupted through tall trees at breakneck speed, spewing flames into the sky. It's called crowning -- when a bushfire moves through the tops of trees or shrubs, burning independently above the ground. Firefighters from the Sydney suburb of Inglewood ran for their lives as the fire burned out of control in Orangeville, around 45 miles (75 kilometers) southwest of Sydney. It’s one of over 100 blazes that is burning across the southeastern state of New South Wales, as Australia experiences one of its worst bushfire seasons on record. Fire and Rescue NSW 79 Station Ingleburn said on its Facebook page that “no one was injured or hurt, our truck survived with no damage…. The video was put up to demonstrate why you need to listen to the fire advisory system.”

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sydney smoke: before and after photos show impact of bushfire on australian city - cnn

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Sydney smoke: Before and after photos show impact of bushfire on Australian city

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Thick smoke from Australia's catastrophic bushfires is still enveloping parts of Sydney, leaving residents to breathe hazardous air after skies turned orange and brown.

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A banana duct-taped to a wall went on a sale at the Art Basel art fair in Miami Beach this week, priced at around $120,000. According to the gallery behind the work, two of the three editions have already sold, with the last now going for even more. The work by Maurizio Cattelan is titled “Comedian” and it comprises a banana bought in a Miami grocery store and a single piece of duct tape. The bananas are “a symbol of global trade, a double entendre, as well as a classic device for humor,” said the founder of the gallery Perrotin, which presented the work. Potential buyers should note there are no clear instructions about what to do if the bananas start to decompose.

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Written by Rory Sullivan, CNN

A banana, duct-taped to a wall went on a sale at Art Basel Miami Beach this week -- priced at around $120,000. And, according to the gallery behind the work, two of the three editions have already sold, with the last now going for even more.

The work, by Maurizio Cattelan, was presented Wednesday by Perrotin, a contemporary art gallery founded in Paris that has had a long association with the Italian artist.

It is Cattelan's first contribution to an art fair in 15 years, the gallery said.

Entitled "Comedian," the artwork comprises a banana bought in a Miami grocery store and a single piece of duct tape. There are three editions, the gallery said, all of which were offered for sale.

Prior to the reported sale, the gallery's founder, Emmanuel Perrotin, told CNN the bananas are "a symbol of global trade, a double entendre, as well as a classic device for humor," adding that the artist turns mundane objects into "vehicles of both delight and critique."

Potential buyers should note there are no clear instructions about what to do if the bananas start to decompose.

According to a press statement from Galerie Perrotin, the artist first came up with the idea a year ago.

"Back then, Cattelan was thinking of a sculpture that was shaped like a banana," it reads. "Every time he traveled, he brought a banana with him and hung it in his hotel room to find inspiration. He made several models: first in resin, then in bronze and in painted bronze (before) finally coming back to the initial idea of a real banana."

Cattelan is known for sculptures that challenge popular culture. One of his artworks -- an 18-carat-gold toilet valued at around $6 million -- made headlines in September when it was ripped out of a wall and stolen from Bleinheim Palace in England.

The functioning toilet -- titled "America" -- had been part of Cattelan's exhibition "Victory is Not an Option."

Five people have since been arrested in relation to the theft. A reward has been offered for the toilet's safe return, though it is yet to be recovered.
This article has been updated with further sales details.

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art basel miami: banana works by artist maurizio cattelan selling for $120

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Duct-taped banana work selling for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami

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Written by Rory Sullivan, CNN A banana, duct-taped to a wall went on a sale at Art Basel Miami Beach this week -- priced at around $120,000. And, according to the gallery behind the work, two of the three editions have already sold, with the last now going for even more.

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At least five people are dead and more are still missing following a deadly volcanic eruption on New Zealand's White Island. The eruption took place with little warning early Monday afternoon local time while dozens of tourists from a nearby cruise ship were touring the volcano. Police say fewer than 50 people were on or around the island at the time of the eruption. So far, 23 people have been evacuated from the island since the eruption, all with some degree of injuries. The five who have since died were among the evacuees. Police say they have had no communications with anyone on the island since the eruption. New Zealand is located in one of the world's most tectonically-volatile regions. Vulcanologists said that while the eruption was relatively small compared to other past disasters, anyone close to the site would have been in serious danger.

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new zealand volcano eruption leaves five dead

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Ben Westcott, Hira Humayun and Bianca Britton, CNN

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Volcano eruption on New Zealand's White Island leaves at least five dead

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At least five people were killed and eight more are still missing following a deadly volcanic eruption on New Zealand's White Island Monday.

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House Democrats announced Tuesday they will bring two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump:⁣
▪️ Abuse of power: Democrats charge that Trump abused his office by pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rivals ahead of the 2020 election while withholding a White House meeting and $400 million in US security aid from Kiev.⁣
▪️ Obstruction of Congress: Democrats say that Trump then obstructed the investigation into his misconduct with a blanket blockade of subpoenas and refusing to allow key senior officials to testify before Congress.⁣
The introduction of articles of impeachment comes after a two-month investigation into Ukraine that was sparked by an anonymous whistleblower complaint. The announcement sets the stage for a dramatic impeachment vote on the House floor next week after the House Judiciary Committee debates and votes on the articles this week.⁣

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By Meg Wagner, Mike Hayes and Veronica Rocha, CNN

Updated 9:01 p.m. ET, December 10, 2019

Impeachment articles announced: House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Trump. They are: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

This week: A vote in the House Judiciary Committee on whether to impeach Trump could happen. That means a full House vote to impeach Trump could take place as soon as next week.

Sign up for CNN's Impeachment Watch newsletter here.

Our live coverage has ended, but you can scroll through the posts below to read more.

President Trump repeated several inaccurate statements at tonight's rally in Pennsylvania, including his most-repeated claims about the Veterans Choice Program and the Democrats' position on immigration reform.

Trump slid in a false claim about Veterans Choice Program. "Look what we did for our vets with choice," he said.

Trump said under his administration median household income went up $5,000 in less than three years, "and then when when you add energy savings and you add tax savings, you have almost a $10,000 gain in three years."

When talking about former 2020 candidate Beto O'Rourke, Trump claimed that O'Rourke wanted to "get rid of religion - the Bible."

Trump said "Mexico is now giving us 27,000 soldiers on our border."

Trump claimed that Democrats "are now the party...of open borders."

Trump claimed, "we haven't taken in money from China, ever. And it's coming in now by the billions."

President Trump said the impeachment he now faces from the House is "impeachment-lite" and argued he faces "two flimsy, pathetic, ridiculous articles of impeachment."

Trump mocked the articles of impeachment Democrats unveiled earlier today, arguing "these two things, they're not even a crime."

"Everyone said this is impeachment-lite. This is the lightest impeachment in the history of our country, by far. It's not even like an impeachment," Trump said.

He argued that by not including articles of impeachment on "collusion" or "obstruction of justice," the Democrats are "admitting" that neither of those occurred.

"They're impeaching me and there are no crimes. This has to be a first in history," Trump said.

President Trump made a series of claims at tonight's rally about energy production in the US.
Here's what we know:
Trump told his usual semi-comedic story about how, if "windmills" are used for energy as he said Democrats want, people's televisions will go out if the wind is not presently blowing: "Darling, I want to watch television tonight and there's no damn wind."

During the rally, Trump claimed that the US is "now number one in the world" in energy.

Following Trump's claim about energy production, he said "our air and our water are cleaner now than it's ever been."

President Trump, discussing the impeachment inquiry at his rally tonight, said "the whistleblower defrauded our country, because the whistleblower wrote something that was totally untrue."

Talking about his July 25th call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said "they didn't know we had it transcribed. Word for word transcribed. So beautiful."

President Trump kicked off his rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, by commenting on his accomplishments.

He told the crowd "our polling has been going through the roof."

Facts First: "Through the roof" is a vague phrase, but there is no sign of Trump's poll numbers significantly increasing as a result of Democrats' impeachment inquiry or their investigation into his dealings with Ukraine.

The day he spoke here, he had a 41.7% approval rating and a 53.6% disapproval rating in FiveThirtyEight's aggregate measure. CNN senior writer and analyst Harry Enten wrote about how recent polls don't show evidence of a pro-Trump backlash.

President Trump claimed tonight at his rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats announced the USMCA deal earlier today "because they're embarrassed by impeachment" and called it a "silver lining."

"The reason they announced it on the same day ... It's a huge deal and it plays down the impeachment because they're embarrassed by the impeachment," he claimed.

Trump noted that his administration has been "waiting a long time for Nancy Pelosi" to back the trade agreement.

He slammed the impeachment process and claimed that "our poll numbers have gone through the roof because of her stupid impeachment."

But Trump argued that USMCA was the "silver lining of impeachment."

"That's the reason they approved USMCA and that's OK with me," Trump said. "They approved it and they're very happy to have it."

Responding to reports that some moderate Democrats are proposing a censure of President Trump as a compromise in the impeachment inquiry, a senior administration official dismissed the idea as "unacceptable."

"Why would you censure the President when he hasn't done anything wrong?" the official asked.

The official pointed to polling that the White House believes is indicative of support slipping for impeachment.

As for the next steps, the official repeated what press secretary Stephanie Grisham observed earlier in the day and said White House officials were surprised that Democrats only announced two articles of impeachment, saying the President's legal team had expected more than that. It's too early to forecast what a trial would look like, the official added, saying the question of Trump's participation has not been resolved.

The official who spotted Trump before leaving for his rally in Pennsylvania said the President did not seem distracted by the inquiry and was preparing for tonight's speech.

President Trump asserted that Democrats announced they reached a deal on USMCA today to "muffle down" the House's introduction of articles of impeachment.

"They wanted to muffle down the impeachment because they were embarrassed by it and they couldn't get the votes," Trump said on the south lawn of the White House ahead of his departure to a campaign event in Pennsylvania.

"They approved today, of all days - we've been waiting a year and they approved today the USMCA. And I call that the silver lining to impeachment, because without the impeachment, they would have never approved it, in my opinion. The impeachment is the reason they approved it and interestingly one hour after the news conference, they went out and did a news conference on the big trade deal," he said.

Trump also called the articles of impeachment introduced earlier today introduced "very weak."

"It's a witch hunt. It's a terrible thing. But even the Democrats, they couldn't find very much, because they put up two articles that frankly are very weak and they're very weak," he said.

Trump also asserted that the "favor" he mentioned on his call with the Ukrainian president was in relation to doing the US a favor, not him.

Impeachment articles announced: House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Trump. They are: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

This week: A vote in the House Judiciary Committee on whether to impeach Trump could happen. That means a full House vote to impeach Trump could take place as soon as next week.

Sign up for CNN's Impeachment Watch newsletter here.

Our live coverage has ended, but you can scroll through the posts below to read more.

President Trump repeated several inaccurate statements at tonight's rally in Pennsylvania, including his most-repeated claims about the Veterans Choice Program and the Democrats' position on immigration reform.

Trump slid in a false claim about Veterans Choice Program. "Look what we did for our vets with choice," he said.

Trump said under his administration median household income went up $5,000 in less than three years, "and then when when you add energy savings and you add tax savings, you have almost a $10,000 gain in three years."

When talking about former 2020 candidate Beto O'Rourke, Trump claimed that O'Rourke wanted to "get rid of religion - the Bible."

Trump said "Mexico is now giving us 27,000 soldiers on our border."

Trump claimed that Democrats "are now the party...of open borders."

Trump claimed, "we haven't taken in money from China, ever. And it's coming in now by the billions."

President Trump said the impeachment he now faces from the House is "impeachment-lite" and argued he faces "two flimsy, pathetic, ridiculous articles of impeachment."

Trump mocked the articles of impeachment Democrats unveiled earlier today, arguing "these two things, they're not even a crime."

"Everyone said this is impeachment-lite. This is the lightest impeachment in the history of our country, by far. It's not even like an impeachment," Trump said.

He argued that by not including articles of impeachment on "collusion" or "obstruction of justice," the Democrats are "admitting" that neither of those occurred.

"They're impeaching me and there are no crimes. This has to be a first in history," Trump said.

President Trump made a series of claims at tonight's rally about energy production in the US.
Here's what we know:
Trump told his usual semi-comedic story about how, if "windmills" are used for energy as he said Democrats want, people's televisions will go out if the wind is not presently blowing: "Darling, I want to watch television tonight and there's no damn wind."

During the rally, Trump claimed that the US is "now number one in the world" in energy.

Following Trump's claim about energy production, he said "our air and our water are cleaner now than it's ever been."

President Trump, discussing the impeachment inquiry at his rally tonight, said "the whistleblower defrauded our country, because the whistleblower wrote something that was totally untrue."

Talking about his July 25th call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said "they didn't know we had it transcribed. Word for word transcribed. So beautiful."

President Trump kicked off his rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, by commenting on his accomplishments.

He told the crowd "our polling has been going through the roof."

Facts First: "Through the roof" is a vague phrase, but there is no sign of Trump's poll numbers significantly increasing as a result of Democrats' impeachment inquiry or their investigation into his dealings with Ukraine.

The day he spoke here, he had a 41.7% approval rating and a 53.6% disapproval rating in FiveThirtyEight's aggregate measure. CNN senior writer and analyst Harry Enten wrote about how recent polls don't show evidence of a pro-Trump backlash.

President Trump claimed tonight at his rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats announced the USMCA deal earlier today "because they're embarrassed by impeachment" and called it a "silver lining."

"The reason they announced it on the same day ... It's a huge deal and it plays down the impeachment because they're embarrassed by the impeachment," he claimed.

Trump noted that his administration has been "waiting a long time for Nancy Pelosi" to back the trade agreement.

He slammed the impeachment process and claimed that "our poll numbers have gone through the roof because of her stupid impeachment."

But Trump argued that USMCA was the "silver lining of impeachment."

"That's the reason they approved USMCA and that's OK with me," Trump said. "They approved it and they're very happy to have it."

Responding to reports that some moderate Democrats are proposing a censure of President Trump as a compromise in the impeachment inquiry, a senior administration official dismissed the idea as "unacceptable."

"Why would you censure the President when he hasn't done anything wrong?" the official asked.

The official pointed to polling that the White House believes is indicative of support slipping for impeachment.

As for the next steps, the official repeated what press secretary Stephanie Grisham observed earlier in the day and said White House officials were surprised that Democrats only announced two articles of impeachment, saying the President's legal team had expected more than that. It's too early to forecast what a trial would look like, the official added, saying the question of Trump's participation has not been resolved.

The official who spotted Trump before leaving for his rally in Pennsylvania said the President did not seem distracted by the inquiry and was preparing for tonight's speech.

President Trump asserted that Democrats announced they reached a deal on USMCA today to "muffle down" the House's introduction of articles of impeachment.

"They wanted to muffle down the impeachment because they were embarrassed by it and they couldn't get the votes," Trump said on the south lawn of the White House ahead of his departure to a campaign event in Pennsylvania.

"They approved today, of all days - we've been waiting a year and they approved today the USMCA. And I call that the silver lining to impeachment, because without the impeachment, they would have never approved it, in my opinion. The impeachment is the reason they approved it and interestingly one hour after the news conference, they went out and did a news conference on the big trade deal," he said.

Trump also called the articles of impeachment introduced earlier today introduced "very weak."

"It's a witch hunt. It's a terrible thing. But even the Democrats, they couldn't find very much, because they put up two articles that frankly are very weak and they're very weak," he said.

Trump also asserted that the "favor" he mentioned on his call with the Ukrainian president was in relation to doing the US a favor, not him.

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december 10 impeachment inquiry news - cnnpolitics

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By Meg Wagner, Mike Hayes and Veronica Rocha, CNN

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December 10 impeachment inquiry news - CNNPolitics

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By Meg Wagner, Mike Hayes and Veronica Rocha, CNN Updated 9:01 p.m. ET, December 10, 2019 Impeachment articles announced: House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Trump. They are: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. This week: A vote in the House Judiciary Committee on whether to impeach Trump could happen.

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Teen activist Greta Thunberg on Friday again criticized world leaders gathered for the COP25 conference in Madrid for not doing enough to stop the ecological crisis that's damaging the planet.The sort of global children's protests Thunberg has inspired and led in recent months are "not sustainable," the 16-year-old continued.
Around 25,000 people from 200 countries are expected to attend COP25, the last gathering of the group before 2020, the year the Paris climate accord goes into effect. Attendees include dozens of heads of state and government, business leaders, scientists and activists.
She had already traveled halfway to Chile when the United Nations changed the location of COP25 to Madrid. The South American nation withdrew as host because after weeks of protests paralyzed the country.

Thunberg refuses to fly because of the high levels of emissions emitted in air travel and instead uses boats, trains and electric cars.

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Greta Thunberg criticizes world leaders' climate actions as they meet at COP25 to discuss the crisis

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Teen activist Greta Thunberg on Friday again criticized world leaders gathered for the COP25 conference in Madrid for not doing enough to stop the ecological crisis that's damaging the planet.

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Iran is still almost entirely offline, days after the government cut off on the internet amid nationwide anti-government protests. Experts say the shutdown is an attempt by the government to stop the flow of information and quash the demonstrations. Here's what you need to know:⁣
⁣
▪️ Protests started Friday after the government announced an increase in fuel prices by as much as 300%.⁣
▪️ Social media images showed banks, gas stations and government buildings set ablaze by rioters.⁣
▪️ The internet blackout started on Saturday evening, according to internet watchdogs. As of Wednesday, the internet is still down.⁣

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iran's internet is mostly down. here's what makes that unusual - cnn

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Ivana Kottasová and Sara Mazloumsaki, CNN

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What makes Iran's internet blackout different

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Iranians are still offline, three days after the government pulled the plug on the internet amid nationwide anti-government protests.

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"Now the government must listen... these are the effects of climate change."
Severe flooding in Venice has left much of the Italian city under water. St Mark's Basilica has flooded six times in the past 1,200 years, but the latest deluge has caused "grave damage" to the iconic church. Tourists, residents and the merchants of Venice are using impromptu raised walkways to move through the highest water levels in 50 years. One of the possible effects of a changing climate is that the jet stream will be more frequently meridional and blocked weather patterns such as these will also become more frequent.

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Severe flooding in Venice that has left much of the Italian city under water is a direct result of climate change, the mayor says.
The highest water levels in the region in more than 50 years would leave "a permanent mark", Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro tweeted.

"Now the government must listen," he added. "These are the effects of climate change... the costs will be high."

The waters in Venice peaked at 1.87m (6ft), according to the tide monitoring centre. Only once since official records began in 1923 has the tide been higher, reaching 1.94m in 1966.

The tourist sites hit by Venice's floods

Images showed popular sites left completely flooded and people wading through the streets as Venice was hit by a storm.

St Mark's Square - one of the lowest parts of the city - was one of the worst hit areas.

St Mark's Basilica was flooded for the sixth time in 1,200 years, according to church records. Pierpaolo Campostrini, a member of St Mark's council, said four of those floods had now occurred within the past 20 years.

The mayor said the famous landmark had suffered "grave damage". The crypt was completely flooded and there are fears of structural damage to the basilica's columns.

The city of Venice is made up of more than 100 islands inside a lagoon off the north-east coast of Italy.

Two people died on the island of Pellestrina, a thin strip of land that separates the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea. A man was electrocuted as he tried to start a pump in his home, and a second person was found dead elsewhere.

Mr Brugnaro said the damage was "huge" and that he would declare a state of disaster, warning that a project to help prevent the Venetian lagoon suffering devastating floods "must be finished soon".

"The situation is dramatic. We ask the government to help us," he said on Twitter, adding that schools would remain closed until the water level subsides.

He also urged local businesses to share photos and video footage of the devastation, which he said would be useful when requesting financial help from the government.

People throughout the city waded through the flood waters.

A number of businesses were affected. Chairs and tables were seen floating outside cafes and restaurants.

In shops, workers tried to move their stock away from the water to prevent any further damage.

One shopkeeper, who was not named, told Italy's public broadcaster Rai: "The city is on its knees."

Three waterbuses sank, but tourists continued their sightseeing as best they could.

One French couple told AFP news agency that they had "effectively swum" after some of the wooden platforms placed around the city in areas prone to flooding overturned.

On Wednesday morning, a number of boats were seen stranded.

A project to protect the city from flooding has been under way since 2003 but has been hit by soaring costs, scandals and delays.

The so-called Mose project - a series of large barriers or floodgates that would be raised from the seabed to shut off the lagoon in the event of rising sea levels and winter storms - was successfully tested for the first time in 2013.

Watch: Venice flood barriers pass first test

The project has already cost billions of euros in investment. According to Italy's infrastructure ministry, the flood barriers will be handed over to the Venice city council at the end of 2021 following the "final phase" of testing.

Italy was hit by heavy rainfall on Tuesday with further bad weather forecast in the coming days. Venice suffers flooding on a yearly basis.

Is climate change behind Venice flooding?
By BBC meteorologist Nikki Berry
The recent flooding in Venice was caused by a combination of high spring tides and a meteorological storm surge driven by strong sirocco winds blowing north-eastwards across the Adriatic Sea. When these two events coincide, we get what is known as Acqua Alta (high water).

This latest Acqua Alta occurrence in Venice is the second highest tide in recorded history. However, if we look at the top 10 tides, five have occurred in the past 20 years and the most recent was only last year.

While we should try to avoid attributing a single event to climate change, the increased frequency of these exceptional tides is obviously a big concern. In our changing climate, sea levels are rising and a city such as Venice, which is also sinking, is particularly susceptible to such changes.

The weather patterns that have caused the Adriatic storm surge have been driven by a strong meridional (waving) jet stream across the northern hemisphere and this has fed a conveyor belt of low pressure systems into the central Mediterranean.

One of the possible effects of a changing climate is that the jet stream will be more frequently meridional and blocked weather patterns such as these will also become more frequent. If this happens, there is a greater likelihood that these events will combine with astronomical spring tides and hence increase the chance of flooding in Venice.

Furthermore, the meridional jet stream can be linked back to stronger typhoons in the north-west Pacific resulting in more frequent cold outbreaks in North America and an unsettled Mediterranean is another one of the downstream effects.

All images subject to copyright.

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Venice mayor blames record flood on climate change

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Severe flooding in Venice that has left much of the Italian city under water is a direct result of climate change, the mayor says. The highest water levels in the region in more than 50 years would leave "a permanent mark", Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro tweeted. "Now the government must listen," he added.

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From a distance, it looked like any other protest winding its way through Lafayette Square — the homemade signs and pink pussy-hats, the chants and claps and fists raised high. But look closer. These protesters were smaller than usual — not in number, but in stature. The signs they carried bore messages such as “Homework kills trees,” and “Batman 2020,” and “I love cats.” Every now and then, a whine would rise above the din. “My feet are hurting,” said a boy. “I’m hungry,” said a girl. In a city where politics seep into playground chatter and protests are more common than rain, Kiyoko Merolli celebrated her seventh birthday Saturday by gathering about 100 kids and adults for a march around the White House. She carried a sign that said, “Time’s up for the bad stuff,” and cartwheeled through the grass on the Ellipse.

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Kiyoko Merolli, foreground right, holds her handmade sign aloft while marching with friends in front of the White House during her protest-themed seventh birthday party. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

From a distance, it looked like any other protest winding its way through Lafayette Square - the homemade signs and pink pussy-hats, the chants and claps and fists raised high.

But look closer.

These protesters were smaller than usual - not in number, but in stature. The signs they carried bore messages such as "Homework kills trees," and "Batman 2020," and "I love cats." Every now and then, a whine would rise above the din.

"My feet are hurting," said a boy.

"I'm hungry," said a girl.

"I thought there were supposed to be cupcakes," said another.

In a city where politics seep into playground chatter and protests are more common than rain, Kiyoko Merolli celebrated her seventh birthday Saturday by gathering about 100 kids and adults for a march around the White House. She carried a sign that said, "Time's up for the bad stuff," and cartwheeled through the grass on the Ellipse.

Recent college graduate and practiced protester Maria Rose Belding, 24, led the group in chants - "Be kind! Stand tall! America should welcome all!" - and a street performer closed out the day with songs about community, togetherness and standing up for what you believe.

It was exactly what Kiyoko wanted.

"A bunch of signs in the air and a bunch of people marching around, being loud," the first-grader said the night before, describing her dream protest. "We could say things like, 'Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Donald Trump has got to go!' "

Except they didn't. Not on Saturday.

Kiyoko's parents insisted that instead of the antagonistic tenor of most D.C. demonstrations, her protest party be filled with positive messages.

It wasn't an easy sell.

Kiyoko originally asked for an impeachment-themed party, complete with a cake shaped like the Trump baby balloon. Her mother, a federal worker, begged her to change her mind. She worried that it could jeopardize her job. (She spoke on the condition of anonymity for that reason.)

Kiyoko's dad, Aric Merolli, 41, said the protest party was a compromise - one that would allow Kiyoko and her friends to express their individual views and support the First Amendment, without overtly politicizing the celebration.

No one imagined it would get so big.

"When she started bringing it up, I thought she was kidding," said Asaka, 9, Kiyoko's older brother. "Because, I mean, this is crazy. Like, who has a protest for a birthday party?"

Kiyoko's grandmother, Saundra Plett, 63, obtained the necessary permits from D.C. police and the National Park Service, which dubbed the rally "Children's First Amendment Demonstration to promote kindness and care."

Dozens RSVP'd.

Kate Stewart, the mayor of Takoma Park, Md., where Kiyoko's family lives, opened the party with a speech.

"Today we are calling upon the words of Angela Davis, and saying we are going to change the things we cannot accept," she told the crowd. "Let's think about the world we are creating."

National Park service withdraws proposal to make protesters pay for security

Stewart, who was enthralled when she received an invitation from Kiyoko, said she wanted to show the birthday girl what it means to be a strong female leader.

"The message I really want her to take away from today is to keep doing what you're doing," the mayor said in an interview. "This is really what we try to nurture in our city. We are a welcoming, diverse community - and that does not happen by accident. It takes things like this birthday party to remind us about why our community values are so important."

Several parents in the crowd saw the event as a teaching moment.

"This is a great way to teach kids about the First Amendment, and how to protest safely," said Malawi Welles, 51, who attended the rally with her sons, 11 and 7, and carried a sign that said "Kid Power." "Our kids aren't just the future. They have a voice today. I think coming to something like this teaches them that."

The District hosts hundreds of protests a year, and about 750 of them receive a permit from the National Park Service, according to that agency's records.

Many D.C.-area kids are experienced protesters by the time they reach double digits.

Several in the crowd on Saturday had already attended a rally or two - the Women's March, or the March for Our Lives, or demonstrations against immigrant detention centers and federal policies that separated families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But for others, Saturday's march was their first brush with activism.

One such first-timer, Maddie, 8, hovered at the front of the line Saturday morning, holding up a sign that bore just one word: "Peace."

"I think it's really kind and generous of Kiyoko to devote her birthday time to this," she said, gesturing all around. "You know, trying to make the world a better place."

Kiyoko attended her first protest last year, when she went to the anti-gun violence March for Our Lives with a group of friends from school. She said she remembers it being loud and crowded. She wished there was more actual marching.

But Saturday's rally - her rally - was almost perfect, she said.

There was only one part she didn't love: A group of family friends arrived carrying large signs with her face blown up big and the words "Kiyoko 2047. America awaits her."

"Embarrassing," the first-grader said in a whisper. "I do not want to be president."

What about an activist?

"I don't know," she said with a shrug. "We'll see."

'I Am a Child': How an artist turned civil rights imagery into a message of protest for immigrant kids

Women's March cuts ties with three original leaders accused of anti-Semitism

Children lead sit-in at Senate building in protest of Trump's family separation policy

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This first grader picked an only-in-Washington birthday: A White House protest

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From a distance, it looked like any other protest winding its way through Lafayette Square - the homemade signs and pink pussy-hats, the chants and claps and fists raised high. But look closer. These protesters were smaller than usual - not in number, but in stature.

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A gunman opened fire at a high school north of Los Angeles early Thursday, leaving at least five people injured, authorities said. Police said the suspect was “in custody and being treated at a local hospital." People hurt in the incident were taken to Henry Mayo Hospital, in Valencia. The hospital is reporting three of the wounded are in critical condition and one is in good condition. Television footage showed students evacuating the school and emergency vehicles responding, with people in gurneys being loaded into ambulances. This is at least the fifth shooting at a U.S. school this year, according to a Washington Post analysis.

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SANTA CLARITA, Calif. - A 16-year-old student pulled a gun from his backpack and opened fire on classmates at a high school north of Los Angeles on Thursday morning, fatally wounding two teens and striking three others before turning the gun on himself, police said.

The shooter, whose attack unfolded at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, survived his self-inflicted gunshot wound and was in grave condition at a hospital, authorities said. The suspect carried out the shooting on his 16th birthday, police said.

Someone called 911 to report the shooting at 7:38 a.m., according to authorities. When deputies arrived two minutes later, they found six students with gunshot wounds in the quad, a popular outdoor gathering spot with trees and picnic table. They later learned the shooter, who was dressed in black, was among them. They also recovered a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun at the scene.

Television footage showed a familiar scene: a campus swarmed with ambulances and police cars, students evacuating school buildings while wounded classmates were wheeled out on gurneys, and worried parents clustered around the school's perimeter.

The shooting is at least the seventh to take place on U.S. school grounds since the start of the academic year, according to a Washington Post analysis, and the first fatal shooting on a campus since students arrived back at school. More than 233,000 schoolchildren have been exposed to gun violence at their own schools since the shooting at Columbine High in 1999.

More than 233,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine

"We need to say 'no more.' This is a tragic event that happens too frequently," said Capt. Robert Lewis of the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff's Station. "When are we going to come together as a community ... to say 'no more'?"

Four people were taken to Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Valencia, Calif., including the 14-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl who died. A third person was in critical condition and a fourth was treated and released.

Two other girls were taken to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center and were talking when they arrived, Patricia Aidem, a hospital spokeswoman, said. One girl was listed in good condition and the other in fair condition.

A seventh person was treated for injuries that were not critical, officials said.

Nov. 14, 2019 | People are led out of Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Calif. after a shooting. (AP/AP)

Authorities would not say where the shooter was being treated.

The shooter was identified through witness statements and school security footage, which captured the attack, law enforcement officials said. The suspect's mother and girlfriend were interviewed by law enforcement.

At an early evening news conference, authorities said just 16 seconds passed from the time the shooter drew his gun and when he shot himself. They said that the shooting was contained to the quad and that they had no information about a connection between the shooter and his victims.

"At this point we have no indication of any motivation or ideology," said Paul Delacourt of the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office.

Santa Clarita is a city of about 210,000 nestled in a large brush-covered valley about 30 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Saugus High, on a campus lined with palm trees, has about 2,400 students, according to federal data. Earlier this year, a half-dozen students from Santa Clarita were detained on charges stemming from violent threats posted online, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The scene outside Saugus High was quiet except for the thwack of helicopters overhead and the rumbling of idling firetrucks and police cars. The area around campus had been blocked off with police tape.

On a quiet street nestled beneath a wooded hill three miles away, police barricaded the road near the house where they say the suspect lives, roping off one home with police tape. In the middle of the day, only a dog's ferocious bark could be heard punctuating the stillness.

Sydney Carzola was in her early morning English class when the room fell quiet. She heard a pop from outside, in the school's quad. The noise wasn't unusual - students with later start times usually file into the building loudly, and Carzola thought someone had blown up a plastic bag and stepped on it.

"But then three consecutive pops went off right away," Carzola, a junior, said in an interview with The Washington Post. She knew it was a shooter.

Students ran into the classroom and barricaded the door with a computer cart. Some of her classmates were shaking and in tears. Carzola and others began considering ways to confront the shooter, perhaps throwing something at him.

"When I was in the situation, I didn't feel scared, and that's the saddest part," Carzola said. "I felt like everyone was going to go through this at some point and this was my turn."

Ryan Payad, a 14-year-old freshman, was across the street from the campus when he heard shots - and then heard screams pierce the air. He turned and ran, joining students fleeing the campus. He ran into his friend, Adolfo Ramirez, and the two spent time at Ramirez's house, reeling from what had transpired that morning.

"I'm just shocked right now," Payad said in an interview with The Post.

Ramirez, also a 14-year-old freshman, was blocks away from the school when the shooting happened. He was struggling to come to grips with how a shooting could take place at his school, in the heart of a suburb of Los Angeles.

"I never expected this to happen in the middle of a neighborhood like Santa Clarita," Ramirez said. "I felt protected."

This is still a very active situation. Reports of approximately 5 victims being treated. Parents, deputies are on scene everywhere protecting your children.
- SCV Sheriff (@SCVSHERIFF) November 14, 2019

Andrei Mojica, president of the student government at Saugus, was in class on the school's upper campus, far enough away from where the shooting took place on the lower campus that he didn't hear the gunshots. But his teacher noticed students running outside.

At first, Mojica and his classmates thought the other students were just playing around. Then, they learned about the shooting. Their teacher locked the classroom door and barricaded it with desks.

"To be honest, I lost all sense of time," Mojica said. "It felt like a short time and like forever." He calls himself lucky for having been on the opposite side of the campus from the shooting. Some of his friends were closer, including one who he said helped a fellow student bandage her injury.

Two female students told CNN in an interview that they heard five shots, one initial bang followed by four rapid shots. Voices shaking, the girls told CNN that students still inside the school hid in closets and texted updates to friends who had made it outside.

Another three students told the network that they were by the school library and saw a wave of classmates sprinting from the quad. They began running, too, leaving campus through a gate and rushing to the first house they could find in a nearby neighborhood.

They also heard five shots, and said they could immediately tell the bang they heard was not the sound of a popping balloon or a falling binder. They said it was a "gut feeling."

"It took us a minute to process that we needed to run," one of the female students said on air.

The girls said they knew it wasn't a drill because the school holds drills only after the school day has started. The mayhem unfolded as students were still making their way to class early Thursday morning.

Another student told KABC in an interview that she and other students huddled in an office when gunfire opened. The student said she texted her father to say, "I love you."

President Trump was monitoring the situation, according to a White House spokesman.

.@POTUS @realDonaldTrump is monitoring the ongoing reports of a school shooting in Santa Clarita, CA. The White House encourages all those in the area to follow the advice of local law enforcement and first responders.
- Judd Deere (@JuddPDeere45) November 14, 2019

More than 233,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), a Democratic candidate for president, spoke with CNN's Anderson Cooper live on air and called shootings at schools "the new normal."

"Our kids are living in fear, wherever they live, they are living in fear," Harris said. "This is yet again another reason why they are so afraid, that literally they will die. It's tragic in the most fundamental way. It is tragic. It is senseless. It is unnecessary. It is devastating."

Harris also called for "reasonable" gun-control laws in the United States. "Enough is enough," she said.

Balingit and Mettler reported from Washington. Mark Berman, Reis Thebault and John Woodrow Cox contributed to this report from Washington.

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Two dead, at least 4 injured in shooting at a Los Angeles-area high school; suspect in custody

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SANTA CLARITA, Calif. - A 16-year-old student pulled a gun from his backpack and opened fire on classmates at a high school north of Los Angeles on Thursday morning, fatally wounding two teens and striking three others before turning the gun on himself, police said.

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The Post spent months determining how many children have been exposed to gun violence during school hours since the Columbine High massacre in 1999. Beyond the dead and wounded, children who witness the violence or cower behind locked doors to hide from it can be profoundly traumatized. The count now stands at more than 233,000 children at 243 schools. The Post has found that at least 145 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 309 have been injured.

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The Washington Post spent months determining how many children have been exposed to gun violence during school hours since the Columbine High massacre in 1999.

Beyond the dead and wounded, children who witness the violence or cower behind locked doors to hide from it can be profoundly traumatized.

The federal government does not track school shootings, so The Post pieced together its numbers from news articles, open-source databases, law enforcement reports and calls to schools and police departments.

The children impacted grew with each round of reporting: from 135,000 students in at least 164 primary and secondary schools to more than 187,000 on 193 campuses.

Since March, The Post has taken a closer look at states with fewer local news sources and searched more deeply for less visible public suicides and accidents that led to injury.

The count now stands at more than 233,000 children at 243 schools.

The Post has found that at least 146 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 308 have been injured.

In 2018 alone, there have already been 25 shootings - the highest number during any year since at least 1999. Still, school shootings remain rare, and only a tiny percentage of the tens of millions of students in America ever experience them.
from in
1 of 248

Injuries and death tolls do not include the shooters

Download the data Read the methodology Send information

The Post's search for more shootings will continue, and it's possible reporters will locate additional incidents from previous years.

Hundreds of outlets cover the deadliest attacks, such as the Feb. 14 rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., where a 19-year-old man with an AR-15 rifle killed 17 people.

Others are covered by a single newspaper, such as a 2001 shooting at Pearl C. Anderson Middle School in Dallas, where a 14-year-old boy held a revolver to a girl's chest and asked her whether she was "ready to die" before a bullet fired, grazing her hand.

Even as the list of incidents has expanded, however, the trend lines have remained consistent.

Among The Post's most important findings: the disproportionate impact of school shootings on children of color.

In cases where the source of the gun could be determined, more than 85 percent of shooters brought them from their own homes or obtained them from friends or relatives, according to The Post's analysis.

The ranks of school shooters include a 6-year-old boy, who killed a classmate after saying he didn't like her, and a 15-year-old girl, who did the same to a friend for rejecting her romantic overtures.

Seven in 10 of them, however, were under the age of 18, which means that - often because of an adult's negligence - dozens of children had access to deadly weapons.

The median age of school shooters is 16.

Read our stories about children and gun violence
Scarred by school shootings How Parkland student journalists covered the shooting they survived and friends they lost Twelve seconds of gunfire: First-graders are haunted by what they survived - and lost - on a school playground The wounds they carry: For six teens at a Las Vegas high school, homecoming week started with a country music concert'Did your father die?' A second-grader grows up surrounded by gunfire
Alex Horton contributed to this report.

About the methodology

The Washington Post spent a year determining how many children have been affected by school shootings, beyond just those killed or injured. To do that, reporters attempted to identify every act of gunfire at a primary or secondary school during school hours since the Columbine High massacre on April 20, 1999. Using Nexis, news articles, open-source databases, law enforcement reports, information from school websites and calls to schools and police departments, The Post reviewed more than 1,000 alleged incidents but counted only those that happened on campuses immediately before, during or just after classes.

Shootings at after-hours events, accidental discharges that caused no injuries to anyone other than the person handling the gun, and suicides that occurred privately or posed no threat to other children were excluded. Gunfire at colleges and universities, which affects young adults rather than kids, also was not counted.

After finding more than 200 incidents of gun violence that met The Post's criteria, reporters organized them in a database for analysis. Because the federal government does not track school shootings, it's possible that the database does not contain every incident that would qualify.

To calculate how many children were exposed to gunfire in each school shooting, The Post relied on enrollment figures and demographic information from the U.S. Education Department, including the Common Core of Data and the Private School Universe Survey. The analysis used attendance figures from the year of the shooting for the vast majority of the schools. Then The Post deducted 7 percent from the enrollment total because that is, on average, how many students miss school each day, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Reporters subtracted 50 percent from a school's enrollment if the act of gun violence occurred just before or after the school day. To provide information about school shootings since Columbine that fit The Post's definition, send us an email at schoolshootings@washpost.com.

Originally published April 20, 2018.

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Analysis | More than 233,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine

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The Washington Post spent months determining how many children have been exposed to gun violence during school hours since the Columbine High massacre in 1999. Beyond the dead and wounded, children who witness the violence or cower behind locked doors to hide from it can be profoundly traumatized.

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The historic Italian city has been brought to its knees this week by the worst flooding there in more than 50 years.
And the council chamber in Ferro Fini Palace started to take in water around 10 p.m. Veneto regional council, which is located on Venice's Grand Canal, was flooded for the first time in its history. Zanoni went on to accuse Veneto regional president Luca Zaia, who is a member of Matteo Salvini's far-right League Party, of presenting a budget "with no concrete actions to combat climate change.".

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italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change - cnn

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Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change

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Veneto regional council, which is located on Venice's Grand Canal, was flooded for the first time in its history on Tuesday night -- just after it rejected measures to combat climate change.

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The rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has risen to its highest level in 11 years. About 9,762 square kilometers (3,769 square miles) of rainforest were lost for the 12 months through July 2019, according to the release from The National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The increase in deforestation comes while the country is under the leadership of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro . Sales said the increasing levels of deforestation were caused by illegal activities such as cattle grazing, agriculture, wood extraction and trade and illegal mining. The number of fires detected by satellites in the region is the highest it's been since 2008..

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amazon deforestation rate hits highest level in over a decade - cnn

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Amazon deforestation rate hits highest level in over a decade

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The rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has risen to its highest level in 11 years, according to Brazilian government data released Monday.

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Protesters set fire to the entrance of Hong Kong's Polytechnic University in a last ditch attempt to stop riot police from entering. The flames followed a night of violence as students hurled petrol bombs at Hong Kong police. dozens of protesters attempted to leave the university through the main entrance as police fired rounds of tear gas. And A police armored vehicle catches fire as protesters and police clash on a bridge at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Schools are closed across the city on Monday, extending a disruption that began last week.

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hong kong protests: fire lit at entrance of fortified university to hold back police   - cnn

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Ben Westcott, Jo Shelley and Rebecca Wright, CNN

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Hong Kong protesters set fire to entrance of fortified university to hold back police

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Students started a fire to stop police from entering the Hong Kong Polytechnic University campus early Monday.

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Alec Ingram, a 14-year-old from Washington, Missouri, died on November 7 after battling cancer for over four years. Alec was diagnosed in 2015 with osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. Manley's organization, which provides bucket lists for children suffering from terminal illnesses, reached out to the Ingram family to ask if there was something Alec wanted to do. And Alec was too sick to do anything. Instead, they saved one special idea for later. Manley recruited thousands of sports and exotic cars to escort Alec to his funeral service at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Washington. Thousands of people with signs lined the procession route to support of Alec's family.

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a missouri teen dying of cancer wanted a sports car funeral procession. thousands helped fulfill his wish - cnn

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A Missouri teen dying of cancer wanted a sports car funeral procession. Thousands helped fulfill his wish

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When a teenager dying of cancer said his last wish was a sports car funeral procession, his community did not disappoint him.

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South Korea has deported two North Korean fishermen suspected of killing 16 fellow crew members, including the boat's captain, before fleeing to South Korean waters. According to South Korean investigators, the two fishermen and 17 others were aboard a squid fishing vessel that left the port of Kimchaek, on North Korea's east coast in August. The South Korean navy captured the men on November 2 after firing warning shots at their vessel during a chase that lasted for two days.

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south korea deports two murder suspects back to north korea - cnn

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Sophie Jeong, Jennifer Hauser and Adam Renton CNN

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South Korea deports North Korean fishermen suspected of mass killing at sea

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South Korea has deported two North Korean fishermen suspected of killing 16 fellow crew members, including the boat's captain, before fleeing to South Korean waters.

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For six days a week, the three women worked as domestic workers in homes across Singapore. But in their spare time, they promoted ISIS online, donated money to militants overseas, and became so radicalized that at least one was ready to die as a suicide bomber in Syria. The women -- all Indonesian nationals -- were arrested in September under Singapore's Internal Security Act on suspicion of taking part in terror financing activities and face up to 10 years in prison. For the handful of women who become radicalized, the process usually begins with a traumatic event, according to IPAC researcher Nuraniyah. And the radicalization can be extremely rapid. IPAC's report details the case of one Indonesian domestic worker from Hong Kong who went from a secular fashion enthusiast to ISIS devotee in less than a year.

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isis recruiters are preying on vulnerable domestic workers in hong kong and singapore  - cnn

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Asia's lonely cities are a ripe recruiting ground for ISIS

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Domestic workers living in Hong Kong and Singapore are being targeted by ISIS. Alienated and vulnerable, they are easy prey. Some have become suicide bombers.

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Nine members of a Mormon family were killed in northern Mexico, authorities reported Tuesday, as the assailants burned alive a woman and her children in a brutal assault. The victims were three women and six children, according to authorities. They were part of a community of dual U.S.-Mexican citizens. President Trump tweeted that “a wonderful family and friends from Utah got caught between two vicious drug cartels, who were shooting at each other, with the result being many great American people killed.” He offered to help Mexico strike back at the cartels, saying they “have become so large and powerful that sometimes you need an army to defeat an army!”

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MEXICO CITY - Assailants killed at least nine members of a fundamentalist Mormon community in Northern Mexico, authorities said Tuesday, shooting and incinerating women and children in a brutal assault that highlighted the increasing grip of organized crime on parts of the country.

Mexican Public Security Secretary Alfonso Durazo said three women and six children of the extended LeBaron family were killed in attacks on three vehicles Monday in the northern state of Sonora. The victims were part of a community of U.S.-Mexican dual citizens who have lived in Mexico for decades.

Drug traffickers in the region came under immediate suspicion. But the massacre was barbarous, even for them.

"There have been conflicts between the cartels of Chihuahua and Sonora," family member Julian LeBaron said on Mexico's Radio Fórmula. "But to open fire in broad daylight on women and children? This crime has no name."

The attacks on the women and children - some of whom were traveling to a wedding - stunned a nation reeling from a series of violent incidents in recent weeks. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been lambasted for the botched attempt last month to arrest a son of the former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Soldiers briefly detained Ovidio Guzmán in Culiacán but let him go after cartel gunmen took control of the city.

President Trump offered to help Mexico strike back at the traffickers. "This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth," he tweeted. He called López Obrador on Tuesday afternoon to offer support.

After the masssacre, a new reckoning: Should the American Mormons of La Mora remain in Mexico?

López Obrador thanked Trump but said pursuing the criminals was "a matter of sovereignty" for Mexico. The leftist leader has been a strong critic of U.S.-backed offensives against organized crime groups over the past 13 years, and has instead emphasized addressing the causes of violence with social programs.

"We don't think that by opening fire, massacring, using force, blood and fire, we will resolve this problem," the Mexican president told journalists.

But the shocking attack was likely to affect the country's security policy, wrote Falko Ernst, the senior Mexico analyst for the International Crisis Group. "Over the next days, I'd expect pressure within the U.S. to build on [the] Trump [administration] - by media and evangelicals, e.g. - and for that pressure to be passed onto López Obrador," he tweeted.

Mexican officials and some of the victims' relatives said cartel gunmen might have mistaken the women's SUVs for those of rival traffickers. But other family members said the attackers knew they were firing on civilians.

"There's been a lot of rival cartels fighting up in this area," said Lenzo Widmar, a cousin of several of the victims who helped search for their vehicles on Monday night. But he said a child who survived told family members that one of the women stepped out of her car and put her hands up.

"They shot her anyway," Widmar told The Washington Post. "They knew it was women and children."

More than 200 bullet casings were found near the vehicles, state authorities said.

Widmar said the community had not received any threats recently. He said all the victims lived in Mexico, though they have close ties to the United States, where they have family and many of the men do seasonal work. The LeBarons describe themselves as Mormons. They're part of a polygamous offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Widmar said the attacks began Monday morning after the families left the community of La Mora in Sonora state. One woman, Rhonita Maria Miller, was heading to Arizona to pick up her husband from the Phoenix airport, he said. The other two were going to accompany her as far as a main highway near the border and then head for Colonia LeBaron in nearby Chihuahua state, to attend a wedding. The community is named for the clan.

How Mexico's cartel war shattered American Mormon's peaceful, but wary, existence

She was just outside the village of San Miguelito when her Chevrolet Tahoe came under attack on Monday morning, Sonora state security officials said. Gunmen shot her and her four children, including 8-month-old twins, relatives and officials said. The vehicle was then set on fire.

About 11 miles east, toward the Chihuahua state border, authorities found a second vehicle, a white Chevrolet Suburban, with the bodies of a woman and two children. Relatives identified them as Dawna Langford and her 11- and 3-year-old sons. They said several other children escaped from the vehicle.

The third vehicle, also a white Suburban, was found about a mile east of the Chihuahua border. The body of a woman was found nearby. She was identified as Christina Langford Johnson.

Family members said Dawna Langford's 13-year-old son, Devin, watched his mother die and then hid his six surviving siblings in nearby bushes. Kendra Miller, the sister-in-law of Rhonita Miller, said the boy covered them with branches before he set out for La Mora for help. He reached the village at 5:30 p.m., she said, six hours after the attack, and relayed the news of the ambush of the women and children.

"For 11 hours, their families all over Sonora, Chihuahua and the midwestern US waited in fear and horror for any news of possible survivors," Miller wrote on Facebook.

Relatives said they were stunned to learn that Johnson's baby had survived the shooting.

"When they started shooting, she ducked down and put the baby behind the seat," said Kenny LeBaron, a cousin who grew up in Mexico and now lives in North Dakota. "I think it was a miracle."

One child is still missing, authorities said. Five of the surviving children were flown to Tucson for treatment.

In communities where so many were related by blood, marriage and friendship, residents were subsumed in grief. It rippled across the border to North Dakota, Arizona and beyond.

"I think we're all still in shock, just trying to survive minute by minute," said Leah Staddon, another cousin of Johnson who grew up in La Mora before moving to Queen Creek, Ariz.

About half of her siblings still live in Mexico. They stay in touch through WhatsApp. Staddon said the violence in the area where the LeBarons live seems to have grown worse in the past several months. Family members have been pulled over and threatened with guns.

"They said we would be okay as long as we didn't travel at night. Everybody made sure they were traveling in the daytime," she said. "But this happened yesterday in the middle of the day."

López Obrador and Mexico's military in rare public spat after 'El Chapo's' son is freed

A crescendo of violence in Mexico is posing one of the biggest tests of López Obrador's year-old presidency. Last month's failed anti-drug raid in Culiacán stirred so much concern that retired generals took the unusual step of publicly complaining to Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval about the president's strategy.

That cartel siege followed shootouts in Guerrero and Michoacan states that left at least 14 security officials dead, and an attack on a bar in the southern city of Coatzacoalcos that killed at least 27.

López Obrador has created a National Guard with about 70,000 troops to improve security, and provided millions of young people with scholarships aimed at discouraging them from involvement in organized crime. But Mexico is on track for its deadliest year in recent history, with nearly 26,000 people slain in the first nine months of 2019.

The two U.S. senators from majority-Mormon Utah, Mitt Romney and Mike Lee, called on López Obrador to ensure justice after the massacre. Romney's forebears lived in a different Mormon community in Mexico, one that retained closer ties with the main LDS Church.

"The U.S. must work with Mexican officials to hold accountable those responsible for this senseless violence," Romney tweeted.

In besieged Mormon colony, Mitt Romney's Mexican roots

Durazo, the public security secretary, told reporters that "serious advances" had been made in the investigation into the killings, but did not provide details.

Mormons began to settle in Mexico and Canada in the 1870s and 1880s to avoid being prosecuted by the U.S. government over their practice of polygamy, according to Matthew Bowman, the chair of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. The main LDS Church, headquartered in Utah, abandoned polygamy and began to crack down on its practice by excommunicating members. Offshoot groups such as the LeBaron family began to form in Mexico in the early 1900s.

For decades, the LeBaron clan lived quietly in farming communities, speaking both Spanish and English. But their relative wealth made them targets of extortion and kidnapping as organized-crime groups increasingly asserted themselves. In 2009, a prominent member of the clan, Benjamin LeBaron, 31, was shot dead near his community. He had publicly denounced the drug traffickers after they abducted his younger brother and demanded a $1 million ransom. The family refused to pay, and the killers said the murder was in retaliation.

The children who survived Monday's attack and were flown to Tucson are "doing okay," said Staddon, who drove to the hospital. A 10-month-old boy and an 8-year-old boy were recovering Tuesday after surgery. A bullet knocked away much of the 8-year-old's jaw.

"They're doing pretty well, considering," she said. "I'm sure as things set in, it will get a lot worse for them."

Kayla Epstein in Washington, Sarah Pulliam Bailey in New York and Gabriela Martínez in Mexico City contributed to this report.

López Obrador and military in rare public spat after El Chapo son is freed

Mexican government says more than 3,000 graves found in search for the disappeared

14 police killed in Mexico ambush

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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Nine members of Mormon family, dual U.S.-Mexican citizens, killed in attack in northern Mexico; Trump offers support

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MEXICO CITY - Assailants killed at least nine members of a fundamentalist Mormon community in Northern Mexico, authorities said Tuesday, shooting and incinerating women and children in a brutal assault that highlighted the increasing grip of organized crime on parts of the country.

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A new report by more than 11 thousand scientists from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency." The study, called the “World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency,” marks the first time a large group of scientists has formally come out in favor of labeling climate change an “emergency," which the study notes is caused by many human trends that are together increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

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Michael Weber had just turned 3 when the Berlin Wall fell and doesn’t remember life before communist East Germany reunited with the capitalist West. Events celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s demise this week are tempered by soul-searching about continued rifts in society. Only 38 percent of East Germans think reunification succeeded. Weber and his friends fall into that group. They took a recent day off from the metal factory where they work to attend a “family day” organized by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern town of Zeulenroda.

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East German border guards watch as demonstrators pull down a segment of the Berlin Wall near Brandenburg Gate in November 1989. (Lionel Cironneau/Associated Press)

BERLIN - Michael Weber had just turned 3 when the Berlin Wall fell and doesn't remember life before communist East Germany reunited with the capitalist West.

Weber's generation, raised in the rubble of the wall, was expected to grow up without division. They were the children of "die Wende," as the reunification is known in Germany and which loosely translates as "the turning point."

And yet that's not quite how things turned out.

"In my head, the wall is still there," Weber said. "There's disappointment here. What was hoped for in the last 30 years hasn't really happened."

Events celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's demise this week are tempered by soul-searching about continued rifts in society.

Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, a Stasi spy puzzle remains unsolved

Although economic divisions between East and West have narrowed, the East still lags behind. And political and psychological divisions, which until recent years had been written off by some politicians as issues of the past, have become increasingly obvious. That's especially the case within the generation raised after reunification and without memory of the communist state that preceded it.

Only 38 percent of East Germans think reunification succeeded, according to a government report released in September. That drops to 20 percent among those younger than 40, who experienced East Germany only as children or not at all.

Weber and his friends fall into that group. They took a recent day off from the metal factory where they work to attend a "family day" organized by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern town of Zeulenroda. Residents lined up for sausages and beer as they waited for an appearance by regional AfD leader Björn Höcke, who has survived calls within his own party to ban him for anti-
Semitic rhetoric.

Weber and his friends brushed off reports of Höcke's neo-Nazi ties and said the AfD speaks to issues they care about.

The traditional parties, Weber said, "had 30 years to make changes, 30 years to make everything equal, and they haven't."

Pompeo tours sites where he served with NATO forces, as U.S. casts doubts over the alliance

A turning point

It was on the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, that an East German government official announced - somewhat prematurely, it would turn out - that the state's citizens would be free to travel to the West.

East Germans swarmed to the Berlin Wall, where they were welcomed by citizens from West Germany. There were euphoric scenes of celebration as the most potent symbol of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe was overrun.

But it was also the beginning of a painful readjustment for many in East Germany.

Reunification gave the 17 million Germans in the East a chance to own property, but many emerging from the communist state lacked the capital to do so. During privatization, factories in the East were shut down or bought up by new owners from the West. Qualifications from the East were rendered invalid.

Two years after reunification, industrial production in the East had slumped by more than three-quarters, and more than 3 million people were out of work.

Many people left, resulting in dispiriting depopulation.

This German city had few foreigners. Then refugees changed it in some surprising ways.

Three decades later, the picture is far better, as Germany's powerhouse economy has lifted both East and West. But disparities remain. Salaries and disposable income in the East now reach about 85 percent of those in the West, according to government figures. East Germans are underrepresented as leaders in business, academia and politics, despite Chancellor Angela Merkel being from the East.

There's also an enduring gap in unemployment rates: 6.9 percent in the East, compared with 4.8 percent in the West.

The split between East and West is even more pronounced in the realm of politics.

The far-right AfD has found support across Germany in the past five years, winning enough seats in the German parliament to make it the largest opposition party. But its message has particularly resonated in the East, and especially among young people. Whereas the Greens have won the under-30 vote elsewhere in Germany, in the Eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia the AfD has come out on top.

The far right is back in the Reichstag, bringing with it taunts and insults

The party has benefited from opposition to Merkel's decision to welcome more than 1 million refugees. But it has also tapped into resentment about how reunification was handled 30 years ago and into a feeling that Germans in the East remain second-class citizens.

During recent local elections in the East, the AfD promised a "Wende 2.0" to right the wrongs of the process.

"Senior politicians always said that unification is not a topic that is relevant in the young generation anymore," said Rainer Faus, one of the authors of a study for the Otto Brenner Foundation this year that researched unity among Germans born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "We didn't really believe that."

The study found that only 33 percent of young Germans in former eastern states agree that it makes no difference whether someone comes from eastern or western Germany, compared with 57 percent in the West who say the same.

"People in the East perceive Germany as less fair," Faus said. "They believe that people in the East were not always treated in a fair manner after the fall of the wall."

And those who agree that the East has been disadvantaged are more likely to vote for the AfD, he said.

Another notable finding: 1 in 5 people surveyed in the former East Germany said they feel more "East German" than "German." There's no equivalent regional identity in the West, Faus said.

Four unexpected places where the Berlin Wall still stands

From the East

Some say they've had little choice but to embrace their East German identity, to fight stereotypes that have become more pervasive in recent years.

Valerie Schönian was born on Sept. 25, 1990, a little shy of a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and eight days before Germany was formally unified. She said she'd never really considered her regional identity growing up.

"For me and a lot of other people my age, I never thought about East and West Germany - that was history for me," she said. "But then something changed."

Schönian points to the 2015 refugee influx, which gave rise to the anti-immigrant Pegida party, and later the AfD. Suddenly East Germans were in the spotlight: for being racist and far-right.

The news media and Twitter commentators began to look at the East and say, "My God, what's going on there?" she said. The emphasis on negative aspects of the region made her want to present a fuller picture.

A German village elected a neo-Nazi as mayor for his email skills. Now they want a reversal.

"Young people like me - who don't go on the streets for Pegida, or go on the streets for the AfD - also want to talk about East Germany and what's going on there and what's cool about East Germany," said Schönian, who is writing a book on the topic.

On a rainy day in Leipzig, Friederike Feiler, 21, points out the church where her parents took part in political protests against communist East Germany. Her father still runs tours there.

Feiler - who is part of an activist group called Aufbruch Ost, or "Departure East" - argues that issues surrounding reunification need to be revisited and discussed. Among the most controversial is the work of Treuhandanstalt, an East German agency created to privatize state companies before reunification in 1990. It closed down many of them.

"It's about getting more people to know about the inequality between East and West, and getting more people talk about it," Feiler said.

But she worries that the focus on political differences is cementing new walls.

"After the elections now, there is a lot of blame on the East Germans," she said. "The problem is when you point the finger and say, 'How can you vote for the AfD? You are bad people.' "

Daniel Kubiak, a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin, said it's important to move on from explaining everything about eastern Germany with East German history. The classic example is when people suggest that Germans in eastern states have an affinity for the far right because they lived under authoritarian rule.

People shouldn't overlook events in the 1990s, he said, such as the emergence of anti-immigrant groups and cases of domestic terrorism.

"Eastern Germany has become a construct in its own right, which has a 30-year history after reunification that you first have to look at," he said.

Despite concerns about enduring divisions, for Schönian, the discussion about reunification's unfulfilled promises and about what it means to be East German can be seen, in itself, as a sign of German unity.

"It just means that young East German people are so integrated, that it's not possible to ignore our voice," she said. For a long time, the East German perspective was ignored in history and the media, she said. "That gets harder and harder. Because of us."

William Glucroft in Zeulenroda contributed to this report.

At Germany's biggest car show, signs that Europe's biggest economy is stalling

Far right surges in eastern Germany elections, exit polls show, but falls short of wins

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, children of a united Germany remain divided

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BERLIN - Michael Weber had just turned 3 when the Berlin Wall fell and doesn't remember life before communist East Germany reunited with the capitalist West. Weber's generation, raised in the rubble of the wall, was expected to grow up without division.

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The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest and covers 40% of South America, according to the World Wildlife Fund. It absorbs billions of tons of carbon dioxide, which helps regulate climate change. A newly-released NASA study has found the atmosphere over the Amazon rainforest in South America has been drying out over the past 20 years and that human activity is the primary cause. Human actions such as burning forests to clear land for farming and grazing are responsible for the rest of the change. The scientists found that the drying of the atmosphere was worse in the southeast region, where the most of grazing and agricultural expansion is happening.

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nasa says humans are drying out the amazon and increasing the threat of fires - cnn

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NASA says humans are drying out the Amazon and increasing the threat of fires

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A newly-released NASA study has found the atmosphere over the Amazon rainforest in South America has been drying out over the past 20 years and that human activity is the primary cause.

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A New York state judge ordered President Donald Trump to pay $2 million to a collection of nonprofit organizations. Justice Saliann Scarpulla found that "Mr. Trump breached his fiduciary duty to the Foundation," including by "allowing his campaign to orchestrate" a televised fundraiser ostensibly for the foundation in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 2016. In her decision, however, the judge didn't impose one of the outcomes the attorney general's office sought: a ban on Trump and his children serving on the board of any other New York nonprofit. She also declined to order Trump to pay punitive damages.

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A New York state judge ordered President Donald Trump to pay $2 million to a collection of nonprofit organizations in connection with a settlement with the New York state attorney general's office to resolve a civil lawsuit alleging the foundation unlawfully coordinated with the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. In her decision filed Thursday, Justice Saliann Scarpulla found that "Mr. Trump breached his fiduciary duty to the Foundation," including by "allowing his campaign to orchestrate" a televised fundraiser ostensibly for the foundation in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 2016, and allowing the campaign to direct the distribution of the money raised from that event "to further Mr. Trump's political campaign." Tap the link in bio to read more. (📸: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

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48k Likes, 2,009 Comments - CNN (@cnn) on Instagram: "A New York state judge ordered President Donald Trump to pay $2 million to a collection of..."

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AS PART OF a “public-health emergency” declared on November 1st in Delhi, millions of face-masks are being distributed to children. Schools will shut until at least November 5th. The cause is polluted air, which Delhi’s chief minister says has turned the city into a “gas chamber”.Globally, says the World Health Organisation, more than 90% of children under 15 breathe air that puts their health at serious risk. The young are especially susceptible, because their lungs are still developing and their breathing is faster than adults’, so they take in more pollutants relative to their body weight. A British study found that on school-runs young children were exposed to 30% more pollutants than the adults accompanying them, because their height puts them closer to exhaust pipes. One of the most common ailments that results is asthma. Poorer children are still more vulnerable, since their schools tend to be near busy roads.

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AS PART OF a "public-health emergency" declared on November 1st in Delhi, millions of face-masks are being distributed to children. Schools will shut until at least November 5th. The cause is polluted air, which Delhi's chief minister says has turned the city into a "gas chamber". The measures are severe but not unusual. In the past year, schools around the world-in Thailand and Malaysia, Mexico and America-have cancelled classes on bad-air days. Air pollution does indeed do terrible things to schoolchildren.

Globally, says the World Health Organisation, more than 90% of children under 15 breathe air that puts their health at serious risk. The young are especially susceptible, because their lungs are still developing and their breathing is faster than adults', so they take in more pollutants relative to their body weight. A British study found that on school-runs young children were exposed to 30% more pollutants than the adults accompanying them, because their height puts them closer to exhaust pipes. One of the most common ailments that results is asthma. Poorer children are still more vulnerable, since their schools tend to be near busy roads.
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Children's brains are also at risk. This is not because pollution confines them to home. Assiduous teachers in Malaysia and China may instruct students online on days when the smog keeps them away from school. In any case, research in 2014 by the Harvard Kennedy School into the effect of shutting schools because of snow shows that missing a few days does not appear to impair learning.

Much more dangerous is the toll that pollution takes on cognitive development and mental health. Research, also conducted in 2014, found that air pollution harmed Israeli students' exam performance. A study in Cincinnati, Ohio, showed an increase in pollution to be correlated with a higher number of psychiatric-hospital visits by children troubled by anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Even very young students are aware of the pollution problem: in a survey by Sustrans, a charity that aims to reduce car use, 45% of British pupils aged four to 11 said they were worried about air quality. Such "eco-anxiety" is the reason that some American school boards are riven by disagreements between environmentalists, who maintain that children need to understand climate change, and administrators who say studying it will traumatise them.

Clean-air campaigners have tried to stem the damage. In Britain, for example, they have, besides encouraging student pick-ups and drop-offs on foot or by bicycle, recommended imposing no-car zones around schools in Birmingham, or, in Sheffield, placing hedges between roads and playgrounds. Such measures are no substitute for bigger changes, though. If trends persist, warns the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, air pollution will cut 1% from global GDP by 2060, in large part from lost agricultural yield, lower worker productivity and higher health costs. Apart from choking on the fumes, today's school children can look forward to bearing those burdens, too.

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How air pollution can ruin schoolchildren's lives

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AS PART OF a "public-health emergency" declared on November 1st in Delhi, millions of face-masks are being distributed to children. Schools will shut until at least November 5th. The cause is polluted air, which Delhi's chief minister says has turned the city into a "gas chamber". The measures are severe but not unusual.

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Simon, a recent Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) defector, waited at a Uganda People's Defence Force and U.S. Special Forces base in Obo, Central African Republic, in March 2014. His brother, also a LRA combatant, was due to defect that day. The LRA killed an estimated 100,000-plus people and kidnapped 60,000 children in a three-decade-long rebellion spanning northern Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo.Since then, armed groups have carried out attacks on previously protected communities, often targeting people based on their religious, ethnic, or livelihood identity.

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Photo by Michael Christopher Brown @michaelchristopherbrown | Simon, a recent Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) defector, waited at a Uganda People's Defence Force and U.S. Special Forces base in Obo, Central African Republic, in March 2014. His brother, also a LRA combatant, was due to defect that day. Most days of the week, pilots transported U.S. Special Forces and supplies from Uganda to South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic to support a coalition that included African militaries to help counter the LRA, led by the fugitive Joseph Kony. Though Kony was not captured, the $780 million operation largely came to an end in 2017 as "the operation has essentially taken that group off the battlefield," said American General Thomas Waldhauser. Since then, armed groups have carried out attacks on previously protected communities, often targeting people based on their religious, ethnic, or livelihood identity. The LRA killed an estimated 100,000-plus people and kidnapped 60,000 children in a three-decade-long rebellion spanning northern Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo. For more follow @michaelchristopherbrown

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Children sit inside Dariya Khan Ghhumnat Rahat camp, set up outside a school in the state of Gujarat in Ahmedabad, India in 2002. They were displaced after some of the worst communal riots in India's history broke out. For days, mobs rampaged the city, burning houses, looting shops, raping women, and killing men, women and children.  while remaining in their own county, have no specific legal status or special protections.

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Photo by Ami Vitale @amivitale | Children sit inside Dariya Khan Ghhumnat Rahat camp, set up outside a school in the state of Gujarat in Ahmedabad, India in 2002. They were displaced after some of the worst communal riots in India's history broke out. For days, mobs rampaged the city, burning houses, looting shops, raping women, and killing men, women and children. While this crisis has passed, there are 40 million internally displaced persons around the world who, while remaining in their own county, have no specific legal status or special protections, and are often at risk of being caught in the cross fire or used as pawns, targets, and human shields. Women and girls are among the most vulnerable. You can help by following those that try to help those currently displaced, like @doctorswithoutborders @ICRC and @refugees @everydayrefugees @rippleeffectimages @thephotosociety #refugees #india #displaced #girls

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According to UNESCO estimates, 130 million girls between the ages of six and 17 are out of school and 15 million girls of primary school age—half of them in sub-Saharan Africa—will never enter a classroom. Every day girls face barriers to education caused by poverty, cultural norms and practices, poor infrastructure, violence, and fragility. But girls’ education goes beyond getting girls into school.

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Photo by Stephanie Sinclair @stephsinclairpix | A student holds a small chalkboard while attending a school for girls in Pakistan. Every day girls face barriers to education caused by poverty, cultural norms and practices, poor infrastructure, violence, and fragility. But girls' education goes beyond getting girls into school. It is also about ensuring that girls learn and feel safe while in school so they can complete all levels of education with the skills to effectively compete in the labor market. They must also learn the social-emotional and life skills necessary to navigate and adapt to a changing world; make decisions about their own lives; and contribute to their communities and the world. According to UNESCO estimates, 130 million girls between the ages of six and 17 are out of school and 15 million girls of primary school age-half of them in sub-Saharan Africa-will never enter a classroom. For more images, follow me @stephsinclairpix @tooyoungtowed. #letgirlslearn #girls #women #educationisaright Nat Geo is celebrating women who fearlessly push boundaries and inspire the next generation of changemakers. For a week, all of our posts and stories on @natgeo were photographed by women, about women. Use #NatGeoWomenofImpact to share how a woman in your life has empowered you.

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206.2k Likes, 734 Comments - National Geographic (@natgeo) on Instagram: "Photo by Stephanie Sinclair @stephsinclairpix | A student holds a small chalkboard while attending..."

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Thunberg was nominated by Sweden and Norway for the prize, which is awarded to a company, organization or person for noteworthy efforts to “integrate respect for nature and the environment into their business or work or for some other form of extraordinary initiative on behalf of nature and the environment. The award, which was established in 1995, comes with a cash prize of 350,000 Danish krone, or about $52,000. Thunberg also said in her Instagram statement that she was turning down the money until leaders in Nordic countries. Last month, youth in more than 150 countries skipped classes to demonstrate their concerns about climate change and to urge their elected officials to do something about it.

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Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg attends a climate rally in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Friday, Oct. 25, 2019. (Melissa Renwick/The Canadian Press via AP)

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has turned down a prestigious environmental honor. The reason? She doesn't think the climate movement needs any more awards.

In a lengthy Instagram post in which she is pictured bundled up in a yellow raincoat, looking pensively into the camera, Thunberg, 16, outlined why she will not be accepting the Nordic Council's 2019 Environmental Award.

"What we need is for our politicians and the people in power [to] start to listen to the current, best available science," she wrote, acknowledging the prestige of the award and the esteemed climate reputation that many Nordic countries have.

Thunberg was nominated by Sweden and Norway for the prize, which is awarded to a company, organization or person for noteworthy efforts to "integrate respect for nature and the environment into their business or work or for some other form of extraordinary initiative on behalf of nature and the environment," according to the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers website.

The award, which was established in 1995, comes with a cash prize of 350,000 Danish krone, or about $52,000. Thunberg also said in her Instagram statement that she was turning down the money until leaders in Nordic countries "act in accordance with what sciences says is needed to limit the global temperature rise."

Thunberg has become a globally recognized face for climate change as her protests to improve the environment morphed from skipping school and sitting outside the Swedish parliament to spearheading a worldwide youth movement in which teens have ditched school to call attention to increasing temperatures and protest disappointing climate change actions by lawmakers.

Her grass-roots movement, FridaysforFuture, is exactly why the Nordic Council chose her for the award.

"Like none before her, in a very short space of time Greta has succeeded in raising awareness of climate and environmental issues in the Nordic countries and the rest of the world," the Nordic Council Jury said. "She has stubbornly and persuasively urged the world to listen to research and act on the basis of facts. Her influence has become so extensive that there is now talk of a global 'Greta Thunberg effect.'"

Last month, youth in more than 150 countries skipped classes to demonstrate their concerns about climate change and to urge their elected officials to do something about it.

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg demands that Congress 'listen to the scientists'

16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg offers a rejoinder to Trump's sarcastic late-night tweet

Jane Fonda plans climate change civil disobedience on the Capitol steps

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Greta Thunberg rejects environmental prize, saying: 'The climate doesn't need awards'

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Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has turned down a prestigious environmental honor. The reason? She doesn't think the climate movement needs any more awards. In a lengthy Instagram post in which she is pictured bundled up in a yellow raincoat, looking pensively into the camera, Thunberg, 16, outlined why she will not be accepting the Nordic Council's 2019 Environmental Award.

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A brush fire called the "Easy Fire" ignited in Southern California on Wednesday morning. Reagan Presidential Library spokeswoman Melissa Giller said an executive director told her no one was trapped inside and that “the worst seems to be over.” The Easy Fire rapidly spread to nearly 1,300 acres in just a few hours, threatening 6,500 homes.

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The Washington Post on Instagram: "A brush fire called the "Easy Fire" ignited in Southern California on Wednesday morning and triggered mandatory evacuation orders in the..."

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3,794 Likes, 169 Comments - The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) on Instagram: "A brush fire called the "Easy Fire" ignited in Southern California on Wednesday morning and..."

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Bernie Sanders is back on the campaign trail and looking to project confidence. Sanders and his campaign are hoping for a revival to tick up his sluggish poll numbers.  Aides and allies of Sanders said the event, plus endorsements from progressive Democratic stars, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, are a sign of positive things to come.⠀

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Bernie Sanders is back on the campaign trail and looking to project confidence. ⠀ ⠀ Standing in front of what his campaign said was nearly 26,000 people in Long Island City, N.Y. this past Saturday, @berniesanders said he was "more than ready to assume the office of president of the United States" following a heart attack on October 1.⠀ ⠀ Sanders and his campaign are hoping for a revival to tick up his sluggish poll numbers-which show a notable lack of support among older voters-following two weeks off the campaign trail. Aides and allies of Sanders said the event, plus endorsements from progressive Democratic stars, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, are a sign of positive things to come.⠀ ⠀ However, questions persist over whether he can climb in the polls, especially if he doesn't make inroads with older voters who are more likely to participate in primaries.⠀ ⠀ Read more at the link in our bio.⠀ ⠀ 📷: @nataliekeyssar for @wsjphotos

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4,066 Likes, 150 Comments - The Wall Street Journal (@wsj) on Instagram: "Bernie Sanders is back on the campaign trail and looking to project confidence. ⠀ ⠀ Standing in..."

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California’s rising gas price highlight a growing divide across the country. Drivers in California have reported paying up to $5 for a gallon of gas this month. Prices have surged this fall in California and other West Coast states following outages at several refineries in the region.

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California's rising gas price highlight a growing divide across the country: Even at a time of abundant global oil supplies, regional differences in taxes, environmental rules and access to energy infrastructure can translate into large seasonal swings in gas prices. Drivers in California have reported paying up to $5 for a gallon of gas this month, compared with the state average of $3.63 this year and the U.S. average of $2.60, according to price tracker GasBuddy. Prices have surged this fall in California and other West Coast states following outages at several refineries in the region. Analysts said the coast is generally vulnerable because of its limited pipelines and refineries that turn oil into fuel products such as gasoline. Higher gas taxes in some states aiming to fund local infrastructure projects and varying pricing strategies by energy companies also drive gaps. Read more at the link in our bio. 📷: Mario Tama/Getty Images

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7,270 Likes, 443 Comments - The Wall Street Journal (@wsj) on Instagram: "California's rising gas price highlight a growing divide across the country: Even at a time of..."

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Libra, a new global payments system and currency, was announced by Facebook in June, with a plan to launch next year.⁠ Mark Zuckerberg spent a lonely few hours fielding mostly hostile questions from politicians on the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.⁠ One problem, as the CEO admitted, is Facebook itself.

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Libra, a new global payments system and currency, was announced by Facebook in June, with a plan to launch next year.⁠ ⁠ In the subsequent four months, however, it has had a bruising time.⁠ ⁠ Many of its partner firms have got cold feet.⁠ ⁠ Politicians and regulators around the world have made disapproving noises. ⁠ ⁠ And on Wednesday Mark Zuckerberg spent a lonely few hours fielding mostly hostile questions from politicians on the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.⁠ ⁠ One problem, as the CEO admitted, is Facebook itself. Click the link in our bio to learn why.⁠ ⁠ Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images #MarkZuckerberg #digital #tech #technology #business #finance #money #currency #crypto #entrepreneur #entrepreneurs

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1,168 Likes, 26 Comments - The Economist (@theeconomist) on Instagram: "Libra, a new global payments system and currency, was announced by Facebook in June, with a plan to..."

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A shootout in Culiacán between security forces and the Sinaloa drug cartel left least eight people dead, and the city terrorised.⁠ This latest gun battle could become particularly problematic for the government and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's crime-fighting plan.⁠ Because never has the Mexican government buckled so publicly in the face of organised crime.⁠
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Never has the Mexican government buckled so publicly in the face of organised crime.⁠ ⁠ A shootout in Culiacán between security forces and the Sinaloa drug cartel left least eight people dead, and the city terrorised.⁠ ⁠ Outnumbered, Mexican soldiers let the son of imprisoned kingpin El Chapo go free.⁠ ⁠ What started as an attempt by soldiers and law enforcement to arrest a prized target, became, once again, a tale of organised crime against the disorganised state.⁠ ⁠ This latest gun battle could become particularly problematic for the government and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's crime-fighting plan.⁠ ⁠ Tap the link in our bio to find out why.⁠ ⁠ Credit: EPA #Mexico #Sinaloa #drug #cartel #crime #ElChapo #AMLO

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17.4k Likes, 298 Comments - The Economist (@theeconomist) on Instagram: "Never has the Mexican government buckled so publicly in the face of organised crime.⁠ ⁠ A shootout..."

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Homelessness is declining in America—but it is worsening in the country’s most prosperous cities. The chief culprit is the cost of housing.⁠Even among the poor—of which there are officially 38m in America—homelessness is relatively rare, affecting roughly one in 70 people.⁠ So too are the reasons for the sharp racial disparities: roughly 40% of the homeless are black, compared with 13% of the population. ⁠
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Homelessness is declining in America-but it is worsening in the country's most prosperous cities.⁠ ⁠ The chief culprit is the cost of housing.⁠ ⁠ Even among the poor-of which there are officially 38m in America-homelessness is relatively rare, affecting roughly one in 70 people.⁠ ⁠ What pushes some poor people on to the streets, and not others, remains obscure. ⁠ ⁠ So too are the reasons for the sharp racial disparities: roughly 40% of the homeless are black, compared with 13% of the population. ⁠ ⁠ But remarkably tight correlations exist with rent increases. Click the link in our bio to read why.⁠ ⁠ Credit: Panos #homeless #homelessness #society #politics

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7,250 Likes, 107 Comments - The Economist (@theeconomist) on Instagram: "Homelessness is declining in America-but it is worsening in the country's most prosperous cities.⁠..."

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Seven seconds is all it took for Indonesian sports climber Aries Susanti Rahayu to break the women's speed climbing world record on Saturday. Rahayu scales the near-vertical 15-metre wall with such ease and grace, it looks like she's barely putting any effort in at all. Rahayu will definitely be one to watch at next year's Games.

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Seven seconds is all it took for Indonesian sports climber Aries Susanti Rahayu to break the women's speed climbing world record on Saturday.

Well, 6.995 seconds if you start to get technical.

Video of the performance, which is in the clip above, has been viewed more than 3.5 million times since being uploaded to Twitter on Monday.

And it isn't hard to understand why.

Rahayu scales the near-vertical 15-metre wall with such ease and grace, it looks like she's barely putting any effort in at all.

The 24-year-old told The Jakarta Post she was "very grateful for this achievement and also for the endless post".

"We are grateful for Aries' achievement today, both the gold medal and for breaking the world record," team manager Asep Rachmat added.

You might be asking 'What is speed climbing and why haven't I heard of it before?'

It's one of three disciplines of sport climbing, which will make its Olympic debut at Tokyo in 2020.
More on 7NEWS.com.au:
According to the Tokyo 2020 official website, speed climbing sees "two climbers secure safety ropes to themselves and attempt to scale a 15m-high wall, set at an angle of 95 degrees, faster than their opponent".

Rahayu will definitely be one to watch at next year's Games.

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'Spider-Woman' smashes world speed climbing record with incredible performance

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Seven seconds is all it took for Indonesian sports climber Aries Susanti Rahayu to break the women's speed climbing world record on Saturday. Well, 6.995 seconds if you start to get technical. Video of the performance, which is in the clip above, has been viewed more than 3.5 million times since being uploaded to Twitter on Monday.

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Since Jair Bolsonaro was elected as president of Brazil last year, the Kayapó have been fighting to protect it from a president who has compared indigenous communities to animals living in zoos and who has allowed industry cut down more of the rainforest this summer alone than in the last three years combined, according to data released by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. People like the Kayapó have been stewards of the rainforest for centuries.

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National Geographic on Instagram: "Photos by Cristina Mittermeier @mitty | I have been lucky enough to experience the Amazon firsthand and to spend time with some of the..."

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471.8k Likes, 1,905 Comments - National Geographic (@natgeo) on Instagram: "Photos by Cristina Mittermeier @mitty | I have been lucky enough to experience the Amazon firsthand..."

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n Ancient Egypt, the stork was associated with the soul. Greek and Roman mythology portrays storks as models of parental devotion. In Chinese wisdom, the stork is a symbol of longevity. In Christianity, the stork is linked with purification, and followers of Islam revered storks because they made an annual "pilgrimage" through Mecca on their migration. Since the mid-1980s, increasing numbers of white storks have chosen to stay on the European continent all year, rather than migrate to Africa in winter.

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Photo by Jasper Doest @jasperdoest | White storks have always been intertwined with humans. Who doesn't know the mythical stories about these large birds bringing babies to new parents? In Ancient Egypt, the stork was associated with the soul. Greek and Roman mythology portrays storks as models of parental devotion. In Chinese wisdom, the stork is a symbol of longevity. In Christianity, the stork is linked with purification, and followers of Islam revered storks because they made an annual "pilgrimage" through Mecca on their migration. However, since the mid-1980s, increasing numbers of white storks have chosen to stay on the European continent all year, rather than migrate to Africa in winter. The reason: the guaranteed, abundant food supply from landfill sites, like this one in Portugal. While it is clear that the stork population has benefited from the large quantities of food, you don't have to be a scientist to see something is wrong. Confronting the enormous amount of waste we produce on a daily basis is truly horrifying. Walking through fields of empty bottles, plastic bags, food leftovers, and toys brings me to tears. I'm embarrassed to be part of our consumer society. We have to turn the tide. This story is not about storks-it is about us. It's time to make a decision: #planetorplastic? Follow @jasperdoest for more images of the human-wildlife relationship. #bethechange #notimetowaste #zerowaste #plasticfree

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332.8k Likes, 3,605 Comments - National Geographic (@natgeo) on Instagram: "Photo by Jasper Doest @jasperdoest | White storks have always been intertwined with humans. Who..."

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An estimated 3,000 people gathered for a solemn vigil to mark the second anniversary of the death of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta’s best-known investigative journalist, who was killed when a powerful bomb blew up her car. Caruana Galizia was known for her revelations about political corruption in Malta. A senior European monitor has raised serious concerns about the police investigation into her killing and says the authorities may have turned down evidence that could lead to those who commissioned the killing.

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An estimated 3,000 people gathered for a solemn vigil to mark the second anniversary of the death of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta's best-known investigative journalist, who was killed when a powerful bomb blew up her car. A senior European monitor has raised serious concerns about the police investigation into her killing and says the authorities may have turned down evidence that could lead to those who commissioned the killing. Caruana Galizia was known for her revelations about political corruption in Malta. Her murder sent shockwaves across Europe and focused a spotlight on allegations by politicians in the European parliament that the rule of law has deteriorated sharply in the small Mediterranean country. Follow the link in our bio to read the full story. Photos: @_joannademarco

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7,767 Likes, 60 Comments - The Guardian (@guardian) on Instagram: "An estimated 3,000 people gathered for a solemn vigil to mark the second anniversary of the death..."

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A tantric mask rests on an ancient coat of armor in an unnamed ruin near the Tibetan border in Nepal. In Tibetan Buddhism, weapons of war and grotesque figures are used to scare away bad energy and ignorance. In the isolated Mustang region of Nepal, Buddhist culture is adapting to a number of unexpected changes. Ancient artifacts and valuable religious icons started to go missing and appeared in international collections.

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Photo by Cory Richards @coryrichards | A tantric mask rests on an ancient coat of armor in an unnamed ruin near the Tibetan border in Nepal. In Tibetan Buddhism, weapons of war and grotesque figures are used to scare away bad energy and ignorance. In the isolated Mustang region of Nepal, Buddhist culture is adapting to a number of unexpected changes. The opening of the region to tourism in 1992 sparked an era of prosperity that inspired the revitalization of many ancient monasteries and breathed new life into a shrinking monastic population. Meanwhile, ancient artifacts and valuable religious icons started to go missing and appeared in international collections. Our team is #onassignment to examine how this breathtakingly beautiful region is adapting to rapid change and how locals are taking action to preserve their valuable culture. Text by Ben Ayers @jetbutterflies. #followme @coryrichards, @jetbutterflies, and our expedition team Kyle Daly, Above The Clouds, and Abiral Rai for more real-time images from #nepal.

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172.1k Likes, 478 Comments - National Geographic (@natgeo) on Instagram: "Photo by Cory Richards @coryrichards | A tantric mask rests on an ancient coat of armor in an..."

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A recent increase in the number of Mexican families and asylum seekers trying to cross into the United States has raised fears of a new border crisis. Vided data on the Mexican migrants told The Post. In recent weeks, thousands of Mexican adults and children have been camping out in queues at U.S. border crossings, sleeping in tents while awaiting a chance to apply for safe refuge. Neither the government of Mexico nor the Trump administration has publicly acknowledged the sudden change.

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A recent increase in the number of Mexican families and asylum seekers trying to cross into the United States has raised fears of a new border crisis. Mexico surpassed Guatemala and Honduras in August to again become the single-largest source of unauthorized migration to the United States, administration officials who provided data on the Mexican migrants told The Post. In recent weeks, thousands of Mexican adults and children have been camping out in queues at U.S. border crossings, sleeping in tents while awaiting a chance to apply for safe refuge. Most concerning to U.S. authorities is the percentage of Mexicans declaring a fear of persecution or harm, a claim that typically prevents their rapid deportation. Neither the government of Mexico nor the Trump administration has publicly acknowledged the sudden change. Read more by clicking the link in our bio.

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4,087 Likes, 338 Comments - The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) on Instagram: "A recent increase in the number of Mexican families and asylum seekers trying to cross into the..."

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Argentina-based startup Beeflow has developed a special nutrient-packed formula for bees. According to CEO Matias Viel, it enables bees to do seven times more flights in cold temperatures than they ordinarily would be able to without the formula. Bees are responsible for pollinating nearly one-third of all crops worldwide, but this past winter saw the highest number of bee colony losses on record as pesticides, parasites and climate change make it harder for them to survive.

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Argentina-based startup Beeflow has developed a special nutrient-packed formula for bees meant to boost their immune systems and make them stronger to work better in colder temperatures. Beekeepers feed the bees the plant-based formula, which contains sugar, water and proprietary ingredients, about once a week. According to CEO Matias Viel, it enables bees to do seven times more flights in cold temperatures than they ordinarily would be able to without the formula. That's a massive uptick amid a dramatic decline in the bee population that's threatening the almost $20 billion bees contribute to US crop production annually. Bees are responsible for pollinating nearly one-third of all crops worldwide, but this past winter saw the highest number of bee colony losses on record as pesticides, parasites and climate change make it harder for them to survive.

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2,380 Likes, 49 Comments - CNN Business (@cnnbusiness) on Instagram: "Argentina-based startup Beeflow has developed a special nutrient-packed formula for bees meant to..."

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A protester from the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion climbed scaffolding on one of London’s most famous landmarks, the Big Ben clock tower. Protesters disrupted train service during rush hour.  Extinction Rebellion demonstrators, who are intent on forcing government action on ecological breakdown, have wreaked havoc in the British capital.

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A protester from the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion climbed scaffolding on one of London's most famous landmarks, the Big Ben clock tower, on Friday. The man, identified by the group as tree surgeon Ben Atkinson, was reportedly wearing a costume and a blond wig resembling Prime Minister Boris Johnson's distinctive hairstyle. Extinction Rebellion demonstrators, who are intent on forcing government action on ecological breakdown, have wreaked havoc in the British capital this week. Protesters disrupted train service during rush hour, causing clashes between passengers and activists, as well as blocked roads and staged protests outside Downing Street. #climatecrisis #extinctionrebellion

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2,495 Likes, 27 Comments - CNN Climate (@cnnclimate) on Instagram: "A protester from the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion climbed scaffolding on one..."

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A white Fort Worth officer who fatally shot 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson in her home on Saturday has resigned and faces possible charges, police said Monday. Dean killed Jefferson by firing through a bedroom window. The department has asked the FBI to review Dean’s actions for possible civil rights violations

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A white Fort Worth officer who fatally shot 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson in her home on Saturday has resigned and faces possible charges, police said Monday. The officer, identified as Aaron Dean, would have been fired for violations of the department's policies, Forth Worth Police Chief Ed Kraus said in a news conference. Earlier Monday, Jefferson's family called for an independent investigation of the officer and the department's practices. The department has asked the FBI to review Dean's actions for possible civil rights violations, Kraus said. "None of this information can ease the pain of Atatiana's family, but I hope it shows the community that we take these incidents seriously," he said. Dean killed Jefferson by firing through a bedroom window. Police said they had been responding to a call about an open door at the residence. Read more by clicking the link in our bio.

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5,695 Likes, 258 Comments - The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) on Instagram: "A white Fort Worth officer who fatally shot 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson in her home on Saturday..."

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By Sunday, more than 20 rivers in central and northeastern Japan had burst their banks, flooding more than 1,000 homes in cities, towns and villages and pushing the death toll higher. Public broadcaster NHK said some died making their way to shelters, including a 77-year-old woman who fell more than 100 feet to her death during an airlift. At one point, the government had advised nearly 8 million people to evacuate.

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Japan dispatched tens of thousands of troops and rescue workers Sunday after a typhoon unleashed widespread flooding and left 35 people dead and 17 missing. Typhoon Hagibis, which means "speed" in the Philippine language Tagalog, tore through Tokyo and large swaths of Japan's main island of Honshu on Saturday, bringing record-breaking rains to many areas. By Sunday, more than 20 rivers in central and northeastern Japan had burst their banks, flooding more than 1,000 homes in cities, towns and villages and pushing the death toll higher. At one point, the government had advised nearly 8 million people to evacuate. Many ignored the advice and stayed home, but others headed to shelters. Public broadcaster NHK said some died making their way to shelters, including a 77-year-old woman who fell more than 100 feet to her death during an airlift. Go to the link in our bio to read more. (Photo by Kyodo News/AP)

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3,782 Likes, 109 Comments - The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) on Instagram: "Japan dispatched tens of thousands of troops and rescue workers Sunday after a typhoon unleashed..."

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14/10/2019

John sat in the classroom and drew pictures of the Tatakai Fighting Warriors in his notebook while his teacher lectured about biology or something. He didn't really know for sure. The last thing he remembered her saying was that there would be a test tomorrow. His heart jumped. He went home to study for the test, but he was soon drawn to his Game Box. He played Tatakai Fighting Warriors long into the night. When his alarm clock rang the next day, he was too tired to hit the snooze button, so he let it beep for about 20 minutes before he got up and went to school. As she had promised, the teacher has prepared a test. She reviewed the testing procedures and directions with the class and then passed out the test. John looked at his test and scratched his head...

1. What event is most likely to occur next?
.., because he got a very bad test score. He regretted that he had not studied bafore. Finally, he began to study and stop playing the Game Box.

2. What evidence from the text supports your prediction?
-..,because he got a very bad test score = He played Tataki Fighting Warriors long into the night.
- He regretted that he had not studied before = He went home to study for the test, but he was soon drawn to his Game Box.
- he began to study and stop playing the Game Box = John looked at his test and scratched his head, because he got a very bad test score.

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Odette, is a veterinarian who saved an injured bird by crashing into a hotel window. During the rehabilitation process he discovered the condition of the bird's feet was chronic and unable to return to the wild. He decide to take care of the bird and become his favorite pet.
Odette then introduces the bird to the children and teaches about the natural world and what happens in it. He takes them around the environment and shows how important the natural world is to our survival.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by National Geographic (@natgeo)

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California's waters have the largest microplastic pollution on the American continent. Microplastic is derived from used car tires or other plastic. According to a study from the San Francisco Bay Miroplastics Project found more than 7 trillion pieces of plastic, which are less than 5 mm in length. And almost all marine organisms are found microplastic in each of their stomachs and other marine chemicals.

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Cars may be doing more damage to our environment than we realized. The biggest source of microplastic pollution in California's coastal waters may come from car tires, according to a study from the San Francisco Bay Microplastics Project. The study found that more than 7 trillion pieces of microplastics - which are defined as fragments of plastic that are less than 5 millimeters in length - wash into the San Francisco Bay each year, with much of it coming from tire particles that were left behind on streets. Microplastics have been found in the stomachs of a number of marine organisms, and chemical additives from microplastics can also bleed out into the ocean, according to the NOAA. (📸: Getty Images)

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4,422 Likes, 47 Comments - CNN Climate (@cnnclimate) on Instagram: "Cars may be doing more damage to our environment than we realized. The biggest source of..."

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Environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion used a fire engine to spray 1,800 liters of fake blood at Britain’s finance ministry. The fake blood was intended to hit Treasury building, though much of it ended up in the street when protesters lost control of the fire hose. The group did it with the aim of drawing attention to what was put forward as UK's contradiction in agreeing to climate change.

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Environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion used a fire engine to spray 1,800 liters of fake blood at Britain's finance ministry Thursday to draw attention to what it says is the UK's contradictory stance on fighting climate change. The group accused the government of claiming to champion the climate change fight while at the same time "pouring vast sums of money into fossil exploration and carbon-intensive projects." The fake blood was intended to hit Treasury building, though much of it ended up in the street when protesters lost control of the fire hose. (📸: Aaron Chown/PA/Getty Images, Simon Dawson/Reuters)

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12.8k Likes, 131 Comments - CNN Climate (@cnnclimate) on Instagram: "Environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion used a fire engine to spray 1,800 liters of fake..."

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according to a guardian watchman manager for the Mamalilikulla First Nation, which has been monitoring the bears for several years. The bears are having trouble finding food. Because warmer temperatures in the British Columbia region have been very thin. Therefore many wild salmon have become extinct due to climate change.

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Heartbreaking images of emaciated grizzly bears by wildlife photographer @rolfhickerphotography are fueling outrage over climate change and its impact on Canada's wildlife. Warmer water temperatures in the British Columbia area have severely depleted wild salmon populations, a vital food resource for grizzlies. "The bears are in trouble," said a guardian watchman manager for the Mamalilikulla First Nation, which has been monitoring the bears for several years. (📸: Rolf Hicker)

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11.3k Likes, 358 Comments - CNN Climate (@cnnclimate) on Instagram: "Heartbreaking images of emaciated grizzly bears by wildlife photographer @rolfhickerphotography are..."

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Germany's coalition government unveiled a $60 billion package over the next four years to speed up the country's transition to renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions. Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that Germany was falling short of its original goal of cutting carbon emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2020. Some environmental activists said the government has missed an opportunity.

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Germany's coalition government unveiled a $60 billion package over the next four years to speed up the country's transition to renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions. When presenting the plan, Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that Germany was falling short of its original goal of cutting carbon emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2020. Now it is aiming for a 55% reduction by 2030. Still, some environmental activists said the government has missed an opportunity. "I am deeply disappointed," the leader of Germany's opposition Green Party said on Twitter. "What the climate needed was fast, forceful, binding. What we got was slow, feeble and non-binding." ( 📸: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

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14.7k Likes, 185 Comments - CNN Climate (@cnnclimate) on Instagram: "Germany's coalition government unveiled a $60 billion package over the next four years to speed up..."

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President Donald Trump has given Turkey the green light to invade northern Syria.In withdrawing around 150 American troops from northern Syria, Mr Trump has accelerated an inevitable clash between Turkey and the Kurds. ⁠The American withdrawal is also grim news for 3.6m Syrian refugees living in Turkey. ⁠
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President Donald Trump has given Turkey the green light to invade northern Syria, a move that Republican lawmakers-including Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader-joined their Democratic colleagues to condemn. ⁠ ⁠ In withdrawing around 150 American troops from northern Syria, Mr Trump has accelerated an inevitable clash between Turkey and the Kurds. ⁠ ⁠ Many worry that Islamic State will have an opportunity to regroup.⁠ ⁠ The American withdrawal is also grim news for 3.6m Syrian refugees living in Turkey. ⁠ ⁠ Why has Mr Trump forsaken America's alliance with the Kurds? Click the link in our to bio to find out.⁠ ⁠ Credit: AFP/Getty #Syria #Kurds #Turkey #America #military #Trump

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12.4k Likes, 321 Comments - The Economist (@theeconomist) on Instagram: "President Donald Trump has given Turkey the green light to invade northern Syria, a move that..."

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A man holds a boy during clashes with police outside a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Sept, 29. Some 12,000 migrants—many of them from Afghanistan—are in a space meant to house 3,000. Authorities said at least one person was killed and which reported that fires were set by migrants who were protesting at the overcrowded Moria camp.

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A man holds a boy during clashes with police outside a #refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Sept. 29. Authorities said at least one person was killed, according to @apnews, which reported that fires were set by migrants who were protesting at the overcrowded Moria camp and demanding to be transferred to mainland #Greece. Some 12,000 migrants-many of them from Afghanistan-are in a space meant to house 3,000, AP adds. Police fired tear gas to control the crowds, an AFP correspondent reported. Photograph by @angelos_tzortzinis-@afpphoto/@gettyimages

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25k Likes, 543 Comments - TIME (@time) on Instagram: "A man holds a boy during clashes with police outside a #refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos..."