CMYK
Yxxx,2016-07-04,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
VOL. CLXV . . . No. 57,283
MONDAY, JULY 4, 2016
© 2016 The New York Times
Even Death Is No Reprieve 3rd Mass Attack in Days Leaves 143 Dead in Iraq
From a Student’s Debt
New Jersey Agency’s Tactics Called
‘State-Sanctioned Loan-Sharking’
By ANNIE WALDMAN
Amid a haze of grief after her
son’s unsolved murder last year,
Marcia
DeOliveira-Longinetti
faced an endless list of tasks —
helping the police gain access to
Kevin’s phone and email; canceling his subscriptions, credit cards
and bank accounts; and arranging his burial in New Jersey.
And then there were the college
loans.
When
Ms.
DeOliveiraLonginetti called about his federal
loans, an administrator offered
condolences and assured her the
balance would be written off.
But she got a far different response from a New Jersey state
agency that had also lent her son
money.
“Please accept our condolences
on your loss,” a letter from that
agency, the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, said.
“After careful consideration of the
information you provided, the authority has determined that your
MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Marcia DeOliveira-Longinetti
still has 92 payments to make
on her murdered son’s loans.
request does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness. Monthly
bill statements will continue to be
sent to you.”
Ms. DeOliveira-Longinetti, who
co-signed on the loans, was
shocked and confused. But her experience with the authority, which
runs by far the largest state-based
student loan program in the country, is hardly an isolated one, an investigation by ProPublica, in collaboration with The New York
Times, found.
New Jersey’s loans, which currently total $1.9 billion, are unlike
those of any other government
lending program for students in
the country. They come with extraordinarily stringent rules that
can easily lead to financial ruin.
Repayments cannot be adjusted
based on income, and borrowers
who are unemployed or facing
other financial hardships are given few breaks.
The loans also carry higher interest rates than similar federal
programs. Most significant, New
Jersey’s loans come with a cudgel
that even the most predatory forprofit players cannot wield: the
power of the state. New Jersey
can garnish wages, rescind state
income tax refunds, revoke professional licenses, even take away
lottery winnings — all without
having to get court approval.
“It’s state-sanctioned loansharking,” Daniel Frischberg, a
bankruptcy lawyer, said. “The
New Jersey program is set up so
that you fail.”
The authority, which boasts in
brochures that its “singular focus
has always been to benefit the students we serve,” has become even
more aggressive in recent years.
Interviews with dozens of borrowers, who were among the tens of
thousands who have turned to the
Continued on Page A15
KHALID MOHAMMED/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Victims were carried away Sunday after a bombing in a busy area of Baghdad killed at least 143 people, many of them children.
This article is by Falih Hassan,
Tim Arango and Omar Al-Jawoshy.
BAGHDAD — As celebrations
for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan stretched past midnight
into Sunday in central Baghdad,
where Iraqis had gathered to eat,
shop and just be together, a minivan packed with explosives blew
up and killed at least 143 people —
the third mass slaughter across
three countries in less than a
week.
The attack was the deadliest in
Baghdad in years — at least since
2009 — and was among the worst
Iraq has faced since the American
invasion of 2003. The bombing
came barely a week after Iraqi security forces, backed by American
Losing Ground, ISIS Uses Guerrilla Tactics
— Worst Baghdad Assault in Years
airstrikes, celebrated the liberation of Falluja from the Islamic
State, which almost immediately
claimed responsibility for the attack.
Even as fires still blazed Sunday morning at the bombing site,
Iraq’s machinery of grief was fully
in motion: Hospitals tried to identify charred bodies, workers
sorted through the rubble searching for more victims, and the first
coffins were on their way to the
holy city of Najaf and its vast cem-
The Bangladesh Attackers
Transforming Terror
The six men believed to have
butchered patrons in a restaurant
had privileged lives. Page A9.
ISIS appears to be evolving into
a larger and more sophisticated
version of Al Qaeda. Page A8.
etery, always expanding, where
Iraq’s Shiites bury their dead. By
Sunday evening, a worker at the
cemetery said more than 70 bodies had arrived, and many more
were expected on Monday.
There were also immediate political repercussions, as the bombing brought an abrupt end to the
brief victory lap that Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister, Haider alAbadi, was enjoying after the recapture of Falluja. Mr. Abadi rose
to power in 2014, and the Obama
administration had hoped that he
could reunite the country after the
divisive tenure of his immediate
predecessor, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose sectarian policies were
Continued on Page A8
A Second President Clinton?
Drone Strike Data Reveals Limits of Fighting Terrorists From Sky
“It’s an important step — it’s an
Mapping Out Her First 100 Days
acknowledgment that transparBy SCOTT SHANE
By PATRICK HEALY
Should she win the presidency,
Hillary Clinton would quickly try
to find common ground with Republicans on an immigration overhaul and infrastructure spending,
risking the wrath of liberals who
would like nothing more than to
twist the knife in a wounded opposition party.
In her first 100 days, she would
also tap women to make up half of
her cabinet in hopes of bringing a
new tone and collaborative sensibility to Washington, while also
looking past Wall Street to places
like Silicon Valley for talent — perhaps wooing Sheryl Sandberg
from Facebook, and maybe asking
Tim Cook from Apple to become
the first openly gay cabinet secretary.
Former President Bill Clinton
would keep a low public profile,
granting few interviews and
avoiding any moves that could
create headaches for his wife, like
his recent meeting with Attorney
General Loretta E. Lynch during
the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mrs.
Clinton’s email practices.
Mrs. Clinton would even
schmooze differently than the
past few presidents have. Not one
to do business over golf or basketball, she would bring back the intimate style of former Presidents
Ronald Reagan and Lyndon B.
Johnson, negotiating over adult
beverages. Picture a steady
stream of senators, congressmen
and other leaders raising a glass
Continued on Page A11
WASHINGTON — The promise of the armed drone has always
been precision: The United States
could kill just the small number of
dangerous terrorists it wanted to
kill, leaving nearby civilians unharmed.
But the Obama administration’s
unprecedented release last week
of statistics on counterterrorism
strikes underscored how much
more complicated the results of
the drone program have been.
It showed that even inside the
government, there is no certainty
about whom it has killed. And it
highlighted the skepticism with
which official American claims on
targeted killing are viewed by human rights groups and independent experts, including those who
believe the strikes have eliminated some very dangerous people.
ency is needed,” said Rachel Stohl,
an author of two studies of the
drone program and a senior associate at the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington. “But
I don’t feel like we have enough information to analyze whether this
tactic is working and helping us
achieve larger strategic aims.”
More broadly, President Obama’s move to open a window on
the secret counterterrorism program comes amid escalating jihadist violence in a list of cities
that
includes
Paris;
San
Bernardino, Calif.; Brussels; Orlando, Fla.; Kabul, Afghanistan;
Istanbul; Baghdad; and now
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Apart from the dispute over the
number of civilian deaths, the notion that targeted drone strikes
are an adequate answer to the terrorist threat appears increasingly
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Monitoring Air Force drone footage from Afghanistan in 2010.
threadbare.
“There’s a massive failure of
strategy,” said Akbar S. Ahmed, a
former Pakistani diplomat and the
chairman of Islamic studies at
American University in Washington. Drones have simply become
one more element of the violence
in countries like Pakistan and
Yemen, not a way to reduce violence, he said.
Among young people attracted
to jihadist ideology, “the line to
blow yourself up remains horrifyingly long,” he said. “That line
Continued on Page A3
When Cities Spurn Growth, Equality Suffers
Silver Gull
Summers
By CONOR DOUGHERTY
Audra Balshin
blowing up a beach
ball at the Silver
Gull Beach Club in
Queens on Sunday.
As private
waterfront clubs
dwindle in the city,
the Silver Gull defies
changing. Page A13.
GEORGE ETHEREDGE/THE NEW YORK TIMES
BOULDER, Colo. — The small
city of Boulder, home to the University of Colorado’s flagship campus, has a booming local economy
and a pleasantly compact downtown with mountain views. Not
surprisingly, a lot of people want
to move here.
Something else is also not surprising: Many of the people who
already live in Boulder would prefer that the newcomers settle
somewhere else.
“The quality of the experience
of being in Boulder, part of it has to
do with being able to go to this
meadow and it isn’t just littered
with human beings,” said Steve
Pomerance, a former city councilman who moved here from Connecticut in the 1960s.
All of Boulder’s charms are under threat, Mr. Pomerance said as
he concluded an hourlong tour.
Rush-hour traffic has become horrendous. Quaint, two-story storefronts are being dwarfed by glass
and steel. Cars park along the
road to the meadow.
These days, you can find a Steve
Pomerance in cities across the
country — people who moved
somewhere before it exploded and
now worry that growth is killing
the place they love.
But a growing body of economic
literature suggests that antigrowth sentiment, when multi-
plied across countless unheralded
local development battles, is a major factor in creating a stagnant
and less equal American economy.
It has even to some extent
changed how Americans of different incomes view opportunity. Unlike past decades, when people of
different socioeconomic backgrounds tended to move to similar
areas, today, less-skilled workers
often go where jobs are scarcer
but housing is cheap, instead of
heading to places with the most
promising job opportunities, according to research by Daniel
Shoag, a professor of public policy
at Harvard, and Peter Ganong,
Continued on Page B2
NEW YORK A13-16
INTERNATIONAL A4-9
BUSINESS DAY B1-6
ARTS C1-6
Wiesel Is Mourned
‘Noisiest Park in the World’
When ‘Not True’ Goes Unsaid
Art Gallery or Living Room?
The funeral for Elie Wiesel was a gathering of family and friends, but others
were nearby paying respects. PAGE A13
Retirees have gathered at the People’s
Park in Chengdu, China, for years. The
city has imposed noise limits after
complaints. Chengdu Journal. PAGE A4
What happens to the balance between
truth and falsehood when an important
portion of the news media hands the
political debate over to partisan operaPAGE B1
tives, Jim Rutenberg asks.
Makeshift galleries are proliferating in
unconventional spaces as artists take
matters into their own hands. PAGE C1
Explosion in Central Park
A young man’s leg was wounded after
he stepped on what investigators believe was part of a firework.
PAGE A14
NATIONAL A10-12
A Scathing Indictment of Bush
Caught in Tech Support Hell
SPORTSMONDAY D1-7
Even the most mild-mannered people
can be driven to rage when they call for
tech help and end up in a tortured loop.
Worse, the companies know it. PAGE B1
Raising the Bar for Rio
The death of a black man at the hands
of a white police officer has split Tupelo
and stirred dark memories.
PAGE A10
Awaiting a Call From Jupiter
Amazon Eliminating List Prices
Few Words, but So Many Hits
Susan G. Finley, one of the pioneer
women in the space program, is part of
the latest galactic adventure. PAGE A12
As retailers face consumer lawsuits
over discounts, the company is altering
PAGE B1
the way it presents bargains.
With fewer than a dozen hits to 3,000,
Miami’s Ichiro Suzuki is as calm as ever.
(His pride is showing for once.) PAGE D1
Mississippi Wounds Reopened
Vashti Cunningham, 18, whose father
was an N.F.L. quarterback, qualified for
the Olympics in the high jump. PAGE D1
A biographer’s narrative about George
W. Bush is punctuated with searing
PAGE C1
verdicts, Peter Baker writes.
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21
Paul Krugman
PAGE A21
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