Exactly how much trouble is the Trump Foundation in?

cnn

Last Thursday, the attorney general of New York sued the Trump Foundation, alleging that the organization affiliated with the President of the United States and his family had broken a number of laws governing charitable groups. "As our investigation reveals, the Trump Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his business to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality," said Barbara Underwood, the Empire State's AG.

The Trump Foundation dismissed the lawsuit as entirely politically motivated, noting that it had given out more money ($19 million) than it had even received in donations.

Where does the the truth lie? And just how normal -- or abnormal -- is the way in which the Trump Foundation operated? I reached out to Marc Owens, the former director of the exempt organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service, for answers.

Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.

Cillizza: Let's start simple: How odd is the way the Trump Foundation operates when compared to other similar-sized foundations?

Owens: Whether the Trump Foundation is compared to similar-sized, i.e. small, family foundations or it is compared to foundations of any size and type, my answer is the same: the Trump Foundation may be unique in the variety and scope of its transgressions of state and federal law, as well as the visibility of the transgressions.

Since the enactment of the private foundation excise taxes in the Tax Reform Act of 1969, the IRS has undertaken a variety of audit programs focused on federal tax law compliance. The results have not generally been made public, but some have, including a report released in 1990 of a statistically valid audit project of private foundations that involved a review of 882 organizations. The project, known as the "Grant-making Administrative Expenses Study," was required by Congress in the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, and the study was made public as a result. In a concluding observation, the study noted, "Overall, we found that private foundations are in substantial compliance with the provisions of the tax laws that apply to them." None of the 882 foundations in the study exhibited behavior even distantly close to that of Trump Foundation as detailed in the New York attorney general's petition.

In fact, while my years at the IRS brought me into contact with many charities and foundations that had violated federal tax law, few approached the variety of the Trump Foundation's transgressions.

Cillizza: What is being alleged here? And what is the most serious charge?

Owens: The petition, because it was filed by the New York attorney general, focuses on state charity law violations, including violations of the duty of care, that is, a foundation's board has a duty to see that a foundation uses its funds for charitable purposes and not for private, personal benefit of board members.

The most serious state charge is essentially the basket of violations of the duty of care as reflected in the purchase of paintings to decorate Trump resorts, the use of foundation funds to settle lawsuit disputes between the Trump Organization and various third parties, the use of foundation assets to support Donald Trump's political campaign and, finally, the misreporting of the preceding on the foundation's federal Form 990-PF return, which New York law also requires to be filed with the New York attorney general. It should be noted, however, that the facts described in the petition have analogs in federal tax law, where the same transgressions that are outlined in the petition could trigger civil tax penalty excise taxes, revocation of tax-exempt status and potentially the application of the "termination tax" under section 507 of the Internal Revenue Code which authorizes the IRS in cases of repeated, flagrant violation of the rules for foundation behavior, to levy a tax equivalent to 100% of the assets of the foundation. Of course, the New York attorney general has asked that the foundation be dissolved and its assets transferred to other charities. Finally, the filing of knowingly false or inaccurate Form 990 federal tax returns has triggered criminal sanctions in at least five or six cases in the last 10 years. The charges in those case included conspiracy to defraud the United States, the making false statements on tax returns and the aiding and abetting of the filing of a false tax return. The penalties can include substantial fines and jail time.

Cillizza: What's the Trump defense?

Owens: In my opinion, there are no effective defenses that Donald Trump and/or his foundation can deploy to either the attorney general's petition or to federal tax charges. About the best he can do is plead ignorance of the law (generally ineffective with the sort of allegations being made) and to try to shift the blame to his accountants and attorneys (which will be factually difficult given Trump's personal involvement in many of the actions. It's unlikely, for example, that one of Trump's attorneys or accountants said that it is fine to contribute to the Florida attorney general's PAC or to buy a painting of himself and hang it in one of his clubs.)

A chasid can be harmed by his relation to his rebbe

ציטוט מ "חסידות וקוממיות"
"רבנו:
               "האמת תורה דרכה".
         
         
         
          
         
         
         
         את תועלת ההתקשרות עם הצדיק, שהיא מיסודות החסידויות בנות זמננו, ביארנו לפי דברי הרבי מפיאסצנא (ראה להלן, עמ' 105), אמנם יש להסתייג ולומר כי בהתקשרות עם הצדיק אפשר שיהיה לאדם חס ושלום נזק, אם אינו ראוי, או שלא הכין עצמו כראוי, כדברי הרבי
                  מביאלא בספר החיים, ואלה מקצת דברי קודשו (מבשר טוב, ספר החיים, סה):
               "והרי כמה בני אדם שבאים לצדיק ומתקלקלים יותר משהיו בביתם, ותולים האשמה בצדיק. ובאמת הם הגורמים לזה, מחמת שלא הכינו את עצמם
                  קודם בואם להצדיק. כי כל שלמות צריכה הכנה מקודם"." - חסידות וקוממיות מאת משה רבפוגל

Uprooting a Marriage Shows Halachic Incompetence

chareidi

By Yechiel Sever

Another instance of falsely liberating an agunah from her state by a beis din that annulled the kiddushin retroactively through an afkinhu, something which is totally forbidden in these times per the ruling of our Torah leadership of current and past generations, raised a storm of acerbic protest in the world of Halacha and dayonus.

A sharp protest was publicized in Yated Ne'eman in the wake of a severe breach made by a private beis din in which an agunah was attempted to be released from her state through the falsely applied, so called loophole of afkinhu.

Thank you and ye'yasher kochakha, Ha-Rav ha-Ga'on R. Daniel Eidensohn, for the kind compliment and for publicizing this article. Admittedly, the article I sent engages in hyperbole when it writes that nullification of kiddushin through mekach ta'ut is rejected by  "the Acharonim, all of whom unanimously maintain that it is altogether forbidden." This overlooks the opinion of R. Moshe Feinstein, Iggerot Mosheh, Even ha-Ezer I, nos. 79-80. Surely, R. Feinstein was also anAcharon. Nevertheless, the article's point appears cogent because there are limits on what R. Feinstein was willing to do - viz. nullify kiddushin in a case of major insanity, not simply OCD and PPD as is alleged to be the case for Reb Aharon Friedman(*) - and even R. Feinstein is challenged by R. Yom Tov ha-Levi Schwarz, Ma'aneh la-Iggerot, nos. 165 and 168, who points out that R. Feinstein seems to be contradicted by Teshuvot ha-Rosh, klal 43, no. 5 . [R. Schwarz' book is freely available here: http://www.israel613.com/books/MEANE_IGROT-H.pdf  ]. The same remonstration against R. Feinstein is offered by R. J. David Bleich, Tradition 33:1 (Fall 1998), footnote 27. [Note, however, that R. Bleich renders three minor technical errors: (a) he fails to cite R. Schwarz as having previously challenged R. Feinstein; (b) he misreferences the relevant Rosh as Teshuvot ha-Rosh, klal42, no. 5, when he should have actually written klal 43, no. 5.; (c) in a typographical error, R. Bleich writes "Rosh did not rule that a get was necessary" instead of "Rosh did not rule that a get wasunnecessary." I have already taken the opportunity to bring these corrections to R. Bleich's attention.] 

I do believe that Ms. Epstein is a tzaddeket gemurah and an anoosah since neither the RCA not the Agudath Israel of America have yet announced that she is still halakhically married to Reb Aharon Friedman. Arguably, then, she should not be asurah la-ba'al and therefore it is a mitzvah to encourage her to return to shelom bayit with her first (and only) husband Reb Aharon Friedman (as per the Gemara, Ketubot 63b, that a when a wife rebels against her husband, it is a mitzvah to announce in the synagogues a diplomatic encouragement for her to return to shelom bayit.) However, even the fact that she is anoosah will not help the baby born from her, since a mamzer is a mamzer, even if born be-oness, as Ha-Rav ha-Ga'on R. David Eidensohn has correctly observed on his illuminating website devoted to this problem. Therefore, I urge the Traditional Orthodox Rabbis of America to have pity on the unborn mamzer before such a mamzer is born, and immediately take up this cause. The Traditional Orthodox Rabbis of America should announce that Ms. Epstein is indeed a tzaddeket gemurah, yet also that it is a mitzvah of shelom bayit - and also of preventing the birth of a mamzer - for her to immediately return to her husband Reb Aharon Friedman. 

Thank you,

Shalom C. Spira

Montreal, Canada

update

תהיו 'שוואנצונעס' - לא 'באטשים' • שיטת הקודש שמנחיל הרבי מויז'ניץ

BHOL

הרוחות בעולם החסידות בכלל, ובחסידות ויז'ניץ בפרט, סערו בשבועיים האחרונים סביב שיחותיו הנוקבות של האדמו"ר מויז'ניץ הצעיר - אותן נשא בפני חסידיו, הן בארה"ב והן בישראל. בשיחות, שנמשכו שעתיים ויותר, לימד הרבי את חסידיו שיטה קדושה בכל הנוגע להתנהגות חסיד לרבו והמשמעויות של כך. לא היינו נזקקים לכתוב על כך ב'בחדרי חרדים', שכן דבריו של הרבי נאמרו בעיקרון בשיחות סגורות לחסידיו, כבדק בית בלבד. אך הקלטות מהשיחות דלפו היישר לרשתות החברתיות, ולקבוצות הנייעס העוקבות אחר הנעשה אצל הרבע'ס - כך שכל חסיד מחסידות כזו ואחרת התחרה עם חברו מי משיג ראשון את ההקלטה של הרבי, ומי שמע כל מילה. השיחות הפכו נחלת הכלל, כאשר כמה מילים ספציפיות מתוכן, כמו למשל 'באטשי' ו'שוונצע', הפכו ללקסיקון חרדי רב תפוצה. זאת, לצד השיר שאותו שר הרבי, עם המילים "די שיטה הקדושה פון די הייליגע ישועות משה, דהיינו שוואנצונעס" - שיר שאינו מושר רק בקרב חסידי ויז'ניץ, אלא עלה גם לרשימת השירים הפופולרית בחתונות בארה"ב. בה בעת, חסידי ויז'ניץ אף החלו כותבים את המילה 'שוואנצונעס' בכל מודעת ברכה לחסידים.

"אין לו מה לחפש"

בדרשה שנישאה בסעודת מלוה המלכה במוצאי השבת האחרונה, נודע ל'בחדרי חרדים' כי הרבי הורה לחסידיו בבירור לשיר את שיר ה'שוואנצונעס' לאחר שיעורי התורה ברבים, כשהוא מוסיף כי - "אם מישהו יוצא באמצע השיר, להגיד לו שאין לו יותר מה לחפש פה אצלנו". עוד סח הרבי בשיחתו, כי בשבוע שעבר ישב אברך ליטאי ב'בית תורה' - חדר סמוך לבית מדרש של ויזניץ - והגה בתורה. במהלך לימודו ענה האברך לשיחה טלפונית שקיבל במכשיר הסלולרי שהחזיק, כשהוא אומר במהלכה בין השאר את המשפט הבא: "אני לומד פה בבית עבודה זרה". אברכים ששמעו זאת, תפסו את הלה והעיפו אותו החוצה מבית המדרש. הרבי הוסיף ואמר: "נהניתי כששמעתי על כך. כך צריך לנהוג עם אנשים כאלה". בנוסף ביקש הרבי, על פי הדיווח שהגיע לידי 'בחדרי חרדים', כי כל מודעה הנתלית בבית מדרש כלשהו של החסידות, תישלח אליו להגהה. "כל דרשן שמגיע לנאום במוסדות שלי - שיתאמו איתי", דרש הרבי. כמו כן, אמר הרבי: "כשנכנסים אלי כל מיני אנשים ומתלוננים על כל מיני דברים שקורים בחסידות, ומציעים לי כל מיני הצעות - "לא משנה מי זה, גם דיין גם ראש הקהל, שלא יבואו אליי. מי שלא נאה לו יכול ללכת, אני לא אבכה אחריו".

לא מתביישים

חסידים עמם שוחחנו, מסבירים ל'בחדרי חרדים', כי כל החסידים מקבלים את הדברים באהבה רבה. "צריך להבין, הרבי הוא אבא שלנו לכל דבר, וכשהוא אומר את הדברים - גם אם הם נשמעים קשים, אנחנו מצייתים. הרבי רוצה שכך החסידות תיראה, וכך היא תהיה. כולנו חיילים של הרבי. בכל דבר אנחנו לא מתביישים".

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dOHD1w2QMo6aO0AaZTZved-ACn3f_4L8/view

https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=http://box2040.temp.domains/~bshchone/dev/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/1_5010656551438909545.pdf

http://www.bshch120.com/category/%D7%A7%D7%94%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%93%D7%A9/feed/

letter from r nota about going to ערכאות based on secret psak w.o. hearing other side

emesvshalom

The Masterpiece Cakeshop Case Proves America’s State Religion Is Leftism

federalist

The Masterpiece Cakeshop case the Supreme Court recently decided centered on the Christian faith of Jack Phillips, the bakery’s owner. From a different angle, however, the case was more fundamentally about a different religious faith, one many of America’s elites follow.

That religion, secular progressivism, so dominates the most powerful institutions in American life that it may rightly be considered our de facto established religion. Thus, the hidden question at issue in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case is the extent to which our governments will be forced to tolerate competitors to our national progressivist religion.

Yes, There Are Secular Religions

“Religion” is not an easy concept to define. A religion may posit one god or many, or spirits but no gods, or perhaps even that the spirits and gods have only illusory existence. What unites these diverse belief systems under the umbrella of religion? All seek to understand humankind, the meaning and purpose of life and whether life may continue after death, the world around us, and the supernatural realm (including the existence and nature of God or the gods). Also, all seek to do so in a coherent or integrated way.

Most Americans today view secularistic and atheistic belief systems as not being religious, but that categorization results more from the history of rhetoric than from a systematic analysis of ideas. In the late Middle Ages, those few Europeans who denied Christianity were viewed as denying religion. In the French Revolution, the secularistic revolutionaries were only too happy to agree with this assessment, since religion—i.e., Christianity—was blamed in part for the excesses of the ruling class. But this denial of the religious nature of secular beliefs does not hold up to scrutiny.

Marxism provides a clear illustration. This belief system tries to make sense of humankind in terms that uncannily parallel Christianity. It tells of original innocence (primitive communism); of the fall into sin (private property); of the human condition since the fall (class struggle); of the conquest over sin (the proletarian revolution); and of the paradise to come (pure Communism). Marxism also tells us about the meaning of life, claiming that our purpose is merely to produce the means of satisfying our needs, and that society can be perfected in this purpose when we finally jettison property and class and achieve Communism.

This is humanity’s earthly salvation, and there is no life after death. Not even the world around us and the supernatural realm escape Marxism’s all-encompassing scope. Dialectical materialism explains them both: only the material or natural world exists, and it operates according to a process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. There is no God.Finally, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw to it that each element of this system arguably makes sense with all the other elements. The system is coherent, even integrated. In sum, Marxism is quite simply a non-theistic religion.

Progressivism Is Simply Evolved Marxism

Progressivism spawned from Marxism and evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century. Although the progressivist belief system is less narrowly focused on economics than its parent was, we are right to see it as Marxism evolved.

Progressivism maintains Marxism’s beliefs in the centrality of the struggles between oppressor and oppressed, the materialist nature of the world, the absence of God and an afterlife, and the necessity of revolution to save humanity through the evolution of the perfect human society in which outcomes are equal for everyone. Like its ideological parent, progressivism is a non-theistic religion.

Liberal Jews are destroying their own religion

NY POST

American Judaism is broken.

When two of the Jewish community’s most celebrated writers, Michael Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman, write an open letter stating that: “Any Jew, anywhere, who does not act to oppose President Donald Trump and his administration acts in favor of anti-Semitism; any Jew who does not condemn the president, directly and by name, for his racism, white supremacism, intolerance and Jew hatred, condones all of those things,” you don’t have to look far to see why.

American Judaism is broken because the Jewish left broke it.

A tiresome fixation on “tikkun olam,” which literally means “repair of the world,” has allowed Judaism to fall into disrepair.

The phrase “tikkun olam” was quietly lifted out of context from a Jewish prayer before the Second World War to mean social justice. It was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by radicals like Michael Lerner, who founded the extreme left-wing magazine, Tikkun.

Since then, we have been led to believe that the purpose of the Jews in the world is to campaign for higher taxes, sexual permissiveness, reduced military spending, illegal immigration, opposition to fracking, the banishment of religion from the public square and every other liberal cause under the sun — all in the name of God.

But the truth is that tikkun olam and its leftist politics have no basis in Judaism. Tikkun olam is not Judaism at all but a distinct religion, whose adherents, it might be said, have culturally appropriated this ancient faith. This religion of tikkun olam commands the allegiance of most non-Orthodox Jews (and some Orthodox ones), who make up the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish community. The dogma of this religion is appealingly simple: Judaism is tikkun olam, which is social justice, which is liberalism. The Jews are called upon to do no less — and no more — than cultivate a liberal paradise in America.

In this, liberal Jews have often had the hypocritical backing of the celebrity corps — literati, Hollywood executives, academics, politicians and financiers — who say one thing in public while, in several cases, doing unspeakable things in private.

But above all, this liberalism — this tikkun olam — teaches that the Jewish People is an outdated and chauvinistic relic, with no need for a nation-state of its own in its ancient homeland. Consequently, Jewish social justice activists help to defame Israel and weaken America’s bond with the Jewish State.

Have Undocumented Immigrants Killed 63,000 American Citizens Since 11 September 2001?

snopes

On 22 June 2018, in the middle of a family separation crisis caused by the Trump administration’s botched “zero tolerance” policy, United States President Donald Trump himself recycled a claim that undocumented immigrants committed an abnormally large number of homicides in the United States.

“Sixty-three thousand Americans since 9/11 have been killed by illegal aliens,” the president said. “This isn’t a problem that’s going away, it’s getting bigger.”

Not only is there no evidence for his claim, it would require a seemingly superhuman murder spree by the nation’s roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants.

The event was held amid a cascade of public outcry against internment camps established by the government for undocumented children, which prompted the Trump administration to quickly change course and order undocumented families to be held together — while seeking the ability to do so indefinitely. But while the president accused reporters of failing to cover this alleged rash of homicides, the numbers do not support this claim.

According to data provided for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 260,743 homicides in the United States from 2002 through 2016 (the most recent year available.) It thus seems mathematically impossible that undocumented immigrants, who make up roughly 3 percent of the population, would have committed just under a quarter of all homicides in the United States during that time period. The bogus figure appears to have originated in a May 2006 post by Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa complaining about the “Day Without An Immigrant” campaign calling attention to the contributions of immigrants to U.S. community.

Without undocumented immigrants, he said, no one would smuggle drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, and non-immigrants would be safer:

The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.

A rate of 33 “deaths” per day for the roughly 4.5 years between the 9/11 attacks and the publication of King’s unsubstantiated claim would come out to 48,180 deaths in total, a rate that would far surpass the 63,000 number by 2018 — if it was legitimate.

Three years later, in 2009, King (who has a history of racist public statements) misrepresented a report from the Government Accountability Office, claiming that 25,064 undocumented immigrants had been arrested for homicides between 2004 and 2008. In fact, the statistic covered the time period between August 1955 and April 2010, a difference of nearly 51 years. The first, fraudulent timeframe would work out to about 17 arrests per day; the real timeframe works out to approximately 1.25 arrests of undocumented people for homicide per day, or 456 arrests per year.

If we multiply that figure by eighteen just to be generous (11 September 2001 to 22 June 2018), we get a final figure of about 8,218 arrests, as opposed to the faulty metric, which yields a total of around 112,790 homicide arrests in the same timeframe. (We will, for now, ignore the fact that arrests are not the same as convictions, and note that we did not factor in leap days.) So the numbers in the claim fall flat on both the amount of murders committed and the arrests and convictions made in those murders.

In March 2018 an Arizona woman, Mary Ann Mendoza, reportedly related to the president the claim that “63,000” United States citizens had been killed by undocumented immigrants. Mendoza’s son was killed in 2014 by an undocumented drunk driver.

charles krauthammer

annulling marriages

trump and his supporters view child separation as a deterrent to illegal immigrants and blackmail to opponents of $6 Bil wall - threaten torture instead

Since Trump has admitted he hates separating children and is only using it as a deterrent or blackmail against hes opponents

he needs to be informed it isn't accomplishing either and he needs to up the pressure - perhaps torture or branding or amputation or perhaps hiring pedophiles as border guards

i Was a Navy Admiral. Here's Why Ending 'War Games' With South Korea Would Be a Grave Mistake

time

Admiral Stavridis (Ret.) was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and is Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

At the final press conference of a whirlwind summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, President Donald Trump announced off-hand that the United States would end what he called its “provocative war games” with South Korea. While the summit itself is a reasonable beginning to what may turn out to be a diplomatic solution to this knotty international problem, to immediately fulfill that promise would be a grave error. After decades as a senior military officer, I cannot imagine simply stopping these useful, sensible and necessary military exercises without first seeing tangible progress in terms of not only denuclearization by North Korea, but also demilitarization by that nation, which fields the fourth-largest army in the world.

Let’s begin with the basics. First, these are not “war games,” which are generally considered to be tabletop exercises that intellectually probe various tactical and strategic options in a given scenario. These are operational military exercises in which ships, aircraft, ground forces and special operators actually practice executing defined war plans. These are like a football team running plays in practice until the movements of the various team members becomes utterly instinctive; or a tennis player hitting thousands of topspin forehands until she can effortlessly nail the shot in an actual match. To have forces forward-deployed without the benefit of this kind of practice would be negligent in the extreme, and it could lead to major combat losses in a real fight.

Second, it is important to understand the scale of these exercises. We do them constantly, often on a weekly basis, with larger events monthly and truly grand-scale exercises a couple of times a year. A weekly exercise might be a U.S. engineering company working alongside our South Korean partners to practice clearing battlefield obstructions. Each month might see our fighter jets in mock combat over the skies of South Korea. A big semi-annual event would include warships from the U.S., Japan, Australia, Singapore and other allies operating together at sea off the coasts of the Korean peninsula. One of the largest annual exercises is Ulchi Freedom Guardian, scheduled for this fall, which could bring about 70,000 U.S. and South Korean troops together to practice warfighting. If we were to unilaterally stop all of those exercises, our readiness would suffer considerably, given all they do to prepare us to “fight tonight” — the motto of U.S. Forces Korea.

There is also a highly negative impact on the seriousness with which our allies — notably South Korea, but also other Indo-Asian partners like Australia, Singapore, and India — view our military capability. One of the reasons our allies, partners and friends want to operate with the United States is the professionalism and readiness of our military. All of that is honed by these exercises — and reduced when we stop conducting them. This announcement shocked them. It will cause our allies to hesitate in aligning with us going forward.

Finally, the U.S. military itself would suffer a drop in morale if not allowed to practice for war. Nobody knows better than our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines how important exercising the military is to the chances of victory. As the military saying goes, the “more you bleed in practice, the less you die in war.” Training hard and realistically — along with providing proper equipment and leadership — is part of the bedrock of the U.S. military ethos. Additionally, the announcement seemed to catch the Pentagon by surprise, and the cavalier way in which the President rolled it out will diminish the confidence that the troops — and the Secretary of Defense himself — have in the Commander-in-Chief.

What is particularly troubling is that we’ve provided this bargaining chip seemingly without getting anything in return other than vague promises for eventual denuclearization. Even if that actually happens — and it has been promised before with no actual results — the North Korean massive conventional force (including a million-plus man army) would pose a significant threat to the south. Without U.S. military presence and these exercises, there is every possibility that North Korea would become the dominant actor on the peninsula, especially with Chinese backing. Stopping the exercises plays into the hands not only of North Korea but also of China, right as it reduces America’s readiness for dealing with military contingencies.

Toddlers Separated From Parents at the Border Are Being Detained in 'Tender Age' Shelters

Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, The Associated Press has learned.

Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis. The government also plans to open a fourth shelter to house hundreds of young migrant children in Houston, where city leaders denounced the move Tuesday.

Since the White House announced its zero tolerance policy in early May, more than 2,300 children have been taken from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, resulting in a new influx of young children requiring government care. The government has faced withering critiques over images of some of the children in cages inside U.S. Border Patrol processing stations.

Decades after the nation’s child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the administration is standing up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents.

“The thought that they are going to be putting such little kids in an institutional setting? I mean it is hard for me to even wrap my mind around it,” said Kay Bellor, vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which provides foster care and other child welfare services to migrant children. “Toddlers are being detained.”

Bellor said shelters follow strict procedures surrounding who can gain access to the children in order to protect their safety, but that means information about their welfare can be limited.

By law, child migrants traveling alone must be sent to facilities run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services within three days of being detained. The agency then is responsible for placing the children in shelters or foster homes until they are united with a relative or sponsor in the community as they await immigration court hearings.

But U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement last month that the government would criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border illegally has led to the breakup of hundreds of migrant families and sent a new group of hundreds of young children into the government’s care.

The United Nations, some Democratic and Republican lawmakers and religious groups have sharply criticized the policy, calling it inhumane.

Not so, said Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services.

“We have specialized facilities that are devoted to providing care to children with special needs and tender age children as we define as under 13 would fall into that category,” he said. “They’re not government facilities per se, and they have very well-trained clinicians, and those facilities meet state licensing standards for child welfare agencies, and they’re staffed by people who know how to deal with the needs — particularly of the younger children.”

Haifa, Israel - In Rare Ruling, Haifa Rabbinical Court Voids Marriage In Divorce Refusal Case -

vos iz neias

 In a significant and rare ruling, the Haifa Rabbinical Court voided the marriage of Oded Guez, a well-known divorce refuser, freeing his wife after more than four years as an agunah.

The ruling follows a groundbreaking ruling earlier this month by a private rabbinical court annulling the marriage of a woman who was an agunah for 23 years, although that was a more complex and controversial case and the ruling was more revolutionary from the standpoint of Jewish law.

The Haifa Rabbinical Court sealed the ruling and details of the decision and the reasoning in Jewish law behind it will not be made known.

The Guez case became notorious after rabbinical court rulings were issued for him to be publicly shamed and ostracized because of his divorce recalcitrance, and his continued defiance of the court and insistence that nothing would induce him to grant his wife a divorce.

Voiding a marriage is a rarely used tool by the state rabbinical courts, which finds fault with the original marriage ceremony or with another aspect of the wedding, which can then be used to retroactively void the marriage.

The court has, however, sealed its ruling and prohibited its publication, so exact details of the decision will not be known.

In the notification about the ruling, the court said specifically that the marriage had been voided, in a decision made by a two to one majority of the three-man panel.

The Rackman Center at Bar-Ilan University, which represents Guez’s ex-wife in the civil family court praised the rabbinical court “for freeing Ms G from her torturous marriage, expressing its hope that this brave ruling will present the way forward for many more to come in other hard cases of chained women.”

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Trump suggests separation of families at border is a negotiating tool

update

Separating Families at the Border Was Always Part of the Plan

ny magazine
President Trump is still trying to avoid responsibility for his administration’s brutal policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border, but a new report confirms that Trump and his advisers had been considering the extreme measures for as long as they’ve been in power. According to the New York Times, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller was “instrumental” in convincing the president to enact the policy, which applies a zero tolerance approach to prosecuting undocumented immigrants caught entering the U.S. — even if that means taking children away from their parents in the process. And while some members of the Trump administration have reportedly been uneasy over the policy and subsequent fallout, Miller is not one of them. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period,” Miller told the Times, “The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”
As outrage intensifies over the separations, President Trump has insisted he’s powerless to change the policy, in an attempt to hide his real agenda. “I hate the children being taken away,” Trump claimed on Friday, and he has continued to repeat the lie that Democrats are the ones responsible. In fact, as reported by the Washington Post, Trump believes that continuing to enforce the policy amid the uproar provides him with political leverage over Congress and could help him force Democratic lawmakers to meet his demands on border security and restrictions on legal immigration. Put another way, the president of the United States is effectively holding thousands of migrant children hostage — and likely causing them irreparable harm in the process — in the hope it will better his chances at enacting the nativist political agenda he campaigned on.

The zero tolerance practice of immediately imprisoning, prosecuting, and deporting immigrants who illegally enter the United States has been around since 2005, but the George W. Bush and Obama administrations were morally and pragmatically opposed to separating immigrant children from their families, even if some adult immigrants were clearly taking advantage of that compassion.

“That’s not who we are,” a team of Obama officials concluded after briefly considering the separations, according to former domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz. Another Obama administration veteran, former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh C. Johnson, told the Times that efforts to deter undocumented immigrants from entering the U.S. are ineffective. “Whether it’s family detention, messaging about dangers of the journey, or messaging about separating families and zero tolerance, it’s always going to have at best a short-term reaction,” he explained.

But President Trump and his policy makers, having risen to power on the back of Trump’s xenophobic campaign rhetoric, employ a darker and more morally flexible pragmatism. The Times reports that Trump officials began discussing the division of immigrant families at the border soon after taking office, and that the Department of Homeland Security even did some trial runs separating children from their parents last summer in Texas. Implementing the border separation policy has always been part of their plan, it just took a little longer than people like Stephen Miller had hoped. After all, the Trump administration has arguably enjoyed no greater success than in its efforts targeting immigrants and all forms of immigration. Zero tolerance, especially toward immigrants, isn’t just a policy proposal to this president and his allies — it is the ideology that animates the entire Trump phenomenon, and a defining characteristic of the world as they want it to be.

cnn

According to reporting by Washington PostThe , White House officials said President Donald Trump has calculated he will gain leverage in congressional negotiations by enforcing a policy he claims to hate.

"I hate the children being taken away," Trump said Friday morning. But Trump suggested Friday in an interview on Fox News' "Fox and Friends" he would not reverse his administration's policy unless Democrats agreed to his longstanding immigration priorities.On Friday, Trump suggested he would not change the policy unless Democrats agreed to his other immigration demands, which include funding a border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. He also is intent on pushing members of his party to vote for a compromise measure that would achieve those long-standing priorities.\\\

‘America is better than this’: What a doctor saw in a Texas shelter for migrant children

wash post

The small shelter along the Texas border to Mexico held 60 beds and a little playground for children. Rooms were equipped with toys, books and crayons. To Colleen Kraft, this shelter looked, in many ways, like a friendly environment for children, a place where they could be happy.

But the first child who caught the prominent pediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. Inside a room dedicated to toddlers was a little girl no older than 2, screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. One woman tried to give her toys and books to calm her down, but even that shelter worker seemed frustrated, Kraft told The Washington Post, because as much as she wanted to console the little girl, she couldn’t touch, hold or pick her up to let her know everything would be all right. That was the rule, Kraft said she was told: They’re not allowed to touch the children.

“The really devastating thing was that we all knew what was going on with this child. We all knew what the problem was,” Kraft said. “She didn’t have her mother, and none of us can fix that.”

The girl had been taken from her mother the night before and brought to this shelter that had been redecorated for children under age 12, Kraft said staffers told her.

The little girl is among the multitude of immigrant children who have been separated from their family as part of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, meaning any adult who crosses the border illegally will face criminal prosecution. That also means parents were taken to federal jails while their children were sent to shelters.

Nearly 2,000 immigrant children were separated from their parents during six weeks in April and May, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said colleagues who were alarmed by what was going on at the border invited her to see for herself, so she visited a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“We needed to see what was happening and tell the country and the world about it,” she said.

One thing immediately became clear to Kraft: Those who work at this shelter, whom she declined to name for privacy reasons, were doing what they could to make sure the children’s needs are met. The children were fed; they had beds, toys, a playground and people who change their diapers. But there are limits to what workers could do. Not only could they not pick up or touch the children; they could not get their parents for them.

“The really basic, foundational needs of having trust in adults as a young child was not being met. That contradicts everything we know that the kids need to build their health,” Kraft said.