DEOMI News Highlights
DEOMI News Highlights is a weekly compilation of published items and commentary with a focus on equal
opportunity, equal employment opportunity, diversity, culture, and human relations issues. DEOMI News
Highlights is also a management tool intended to serve the informational needs of equity professionals and senior
DOD officials in the continuing assessment of defense policies, programs, and actions. Further reproduction or
redistribution for private use or gain is subject to original copyright restrictions.
AF releases implementation plans for latest diversity, inclusion initiatives [Secretary of the Air Force
Public Affairs, U.S. Air Force News, 25 April 2017]
 Headquarters Air Force released finalized implementation plans following the second notification to
Airmen relaying new diversity and inclusion initiatives on April 9, 2017.
 The memo summarizes the implementations for 13 initiatives, including efforts to provide additional
support to geographically separated military spouses, lengthen the early separation decision window for
female Airmen having children, establish diverse slates for key military development positions, promote
civilian participation in professional development programs, and better market career fields that currently
lack diversity to female and minority populations.
 The Air Force has made continuous efforts toward enhancing diversity and inclusion throughout the
force, including nine initiatives launched in 2015 to help build teams comprised of individuals with
diverse backgrounds, experiences, and demographics. However, Air Force leaders acknowledged work
remains to ensure continued success.
AF releases implementation plans for latest diversity, inclusion initiatives
Court: Employers can pay women less based on past salaries [Sudhin Thanawala, The Associated
Press, 27 April 2017]
 Employers can legally pay women less than men for the same work based on differences in the workers’
previous salaries, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
 The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower-court ruling that said pay
differences based exclusively on prior salaries were discriminatory under the federal Equal Pay Act.
 The Equal Pay Act, signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, forbids employers from
paying women less than men based on sex for equal work performed under similar working conditions.
But it creates exemptions when pay is based on seniority, merit, quantity or quality of work, or “any
other factor other than sex.”
Court: Employers can pay women less based on past salaries
Siren wails as Israel marks annual Holocaust Remembrance Day [Aron Heller, The Associated Press,
24 April 2017]
 Israel came to a standstill on Monday as people stopped in their tracks for a two-minute siren that wailed
across the country in remembrance of the Holocaust’s 6 million Jewish victims.
 The ritual is the centerpiece of Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day for those who were
systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Pedestrians stood in
place, buses stopped on busy streets, and cars pulled over on major highways—their drivers standing on
the roads with their heads bowed.
 A wreath laying ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial followed, with Israeli leaders and
Holocaust survivors in attendance. A public reading of names also took place in Israel’s parliament,
where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders recited names of relatives who were killed.
Other ceremonies, prayers, and musical performances took place in schools, community centers, and
army bases around the country.
Siren wails as Israel marks annual Holocaust Remembrance Day
28 April 2017
Page 1
DEOMI News Highlights
Culture
New Orleans Begins Removing Confederate Monuments, Under Police Guard
Discrimination
Court: Employers can pay women less based on past salaries
New York City’s Subway System Violates Local and Federal Laws, Disability Groups Say
Palantir settles U.S. lawsuit charging bias against Asians
Diversity
AF releases implementation plans for latest diversity, inclusion initiatives
Transgender Offutt airman – finally ‘able to live as my true self’ – finds support, acceptance during
transition
Miscellaneous
Army secretary nominee addresses LGBT controversy on Facebook
Do Women Have to Register for the Draft? No. But Misinformation Spreads.
Holocaust remembrance reaches beyond just one day [OPINION]
Official: VA sees curbing veteran suicides as top priority
Siren wails as Israel marks annual Holocaust Remembrance Day
Trump condemns Holocaust deniers
Misconduct
Hazing on the academy’s gymnastics team: Cadets, coach were punished after investigation
Racism
After Hate Crimes, Victims Get Stuck With the Bill
Anti-Semitic incidents rose a whopping 86% in the first 3 months of 2017
Boston police make little progress on race gap
Florida principal instructed teachers to group White students together at majority-Black school
Sexual Assault/Harassment
Jury rejects prosecution’s sex assault case against sergeant
Marine faces felony charge for allegedly posting intimate pictures of woman online
A survey on sexual assault alarmed colleges. Here’s how top schools responded.
28 April 2017
Page 2
Culture
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/us/new-orleans-confederate-statue.html
New Orleans Begins Removing Confederate Monuments,
Under Police Guard
By Christopher Mele
The New York Times, April 24, 2017
Workers dismantle an obelisk dedicated to the Battle of Liberty
Place, which commemorated whites who tried to topple a biracial
post-Civil War government. (Credit: Gerald Herbert/Associated
Press)
New Orleans on Monday began removing four monuments
dedicated to the era of the Confederacy and its aftermath, capping a
prolonged battle about the future of the memorials, which critics
deemed symbols of racism and intolerance and which supporters
viewed as historically important.
Workers dismantled an obelisk, which was erected in 1891 to honor members of the Crescent City White
League who in 1874 fought in the Reconstruction-era Battle of Liberty Place against the racially integrated
New Orleans police and state militia, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a statement.
The monument, which was sometimes used as a rallying point by David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, has
stirred debate for decades. Local leaders unsuccessfully tried to remove it in 1981 and 1993.
The workers were dressed in flak jackets, helmets and scarves to conceal their identities because of
concerns about their safety. Police officers watched from a nearby hotel.
Pieces of the 15,000-pound monument were put on a truck and hauled away.
Other monuments expected to be removed include a bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in a traffic circle,
named Lee Circle, in the city’s central business district since 1884; an equestrian statue of P.G.T.
Beauregard, a Confederate general; and a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.
Citing security risks and threats to contractors seeking to do the work, the city would not reveal details
about the removal of the other statues. The four monuments will be stored in a city-owned facility “until
they can be moved to a new location where they can be placed in proper context,” said Tyronne B. Walker,
a city spokesman.
The monuments were erected decades after the Civil War ended by people who wanted to demonstrate that
the South should feel no guilt in having fought the war, the mayor’s statement said.
“The removal of these statues sends a clear and unequivocal message to the people of New Orleans and the
nation: New Orleans celebrates our diversity, inclusion and tolerance,” Mr. Landrieu said. “This is not
about politics, blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once. This is about
showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile
— and most importantly — choose a better future.”
The debate over Confederate symbols has taken center stage since nine people were killed at a black church
in South Carolina in June 2015. South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag, which flew at its State
House for more than 50 years, and other Southern cities have considered taking down monuments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/us/new-orleans-confederate-statue.html
Harcourt Fuller, an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and a scholar of
national and regional symbolism, said in an email that supporters of the monuments see them as part of
their “historical and cultural legacy that needs to be maintained and protected.
“We’re talking largely about these concrete symbols,” he added. “By themselves, they’re lifeless. They’re
not living symbols. But we as citizens project our own historical values onto them.”
The Liberty Place monument, which was 35 to 40 feet tall, commemorated a violent uprising by white
Democrats against the racial integration of the city’s police force and the Republicans who governed
Louisiana. The White League won the battle and forcibly removed the governor, but federal troops arrived
three days later to return the governor to power.
Charles Lincoln speaks at a candlelight vigil at the statue of
Jefferson Davis in New Orleans on Monday. (Credit: Gerald
Herbert/Associated Press)
The battle remained an important symbol to those who resisted
Reconstruction, the period of transforming Confederate states after
the Civil War. From 1932 until 1993, the monument bore a plaque
that said, in part, that the “national election of November 1876
recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state,”
the city statement said.
In 1993, the City Council voted to remove the obelisk, but instead the plaque was covered with a new one
that read: “In honor of those Americans on both sides who died in the Battle of Liberty Place” and called it
“a conflict of the past that should teach us lessons for the future.”
It was once prominently perched in a main shopping era, but was relegated to a spot at the end of the
French Quarter when it was removed for street work in 1989.
After moving the statues into storage, New Orleans will seek a museum or other site to house them. The
city said it raised more than $600,000 in private funding to relocate the statues.
The opposition to the monuments’ removal — expressed in op-ed articles, social media posts and shouting
at public meetings — was vigorous. A group opposing their removal said it had collected 31,000
signatures for a petition.
Demonstrators gathered for a candlelight vigil on Monday as workers removed the Liberty Place
monument.
Robert Bonner, 63, who said he was a Civil War re-enactor, protested the monument’s removal. “I think
it’s a terrible thing,” he told The A.P. “When you start removing the history of the city, you start losing
money. You start losing where you came from and where you’ve been.”
One of the demonstrators who gathered on Monday as workers
dismantled the Liberty Place monument. (Credit: Gerald
Herbert/Associated Press)
The removal happened on Confederate Memorial Day, which is
formally observed by Alabama and Mississippi to commemorate
those who died in the Civil War.
In December 2015, the City Council voted 6 to 1 to take the statues
down. In January 2016, a federal judge dismissed an attempt by
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/us/new-orleans-confederate-statue.html
preservation groups and a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to stop their removal.
An organization dedicated to preserving monuments in New Orleans, the Monumental Task Committee,
opposed removing the statues.
In a statement on Monday, Pierre McGraw, the group’s president, said the removal process had been
“flawed since the beginning” and that the use of unidentified money reeks of “atrocious government.”
“People across Louisiana should be concerned over what will disappear next,” the statement added.
Professor Robin A. Lenhardt, a law professor at of the Center on Race, Law and Justice at Fordham Law
School, said in an email that city officials should be concerned about where to go from here.
“Simply to remove the statutes without a plan for community engagement and discourse would be a
mistake, a real missed opportunity,” she wrote.
Daniel Victor contributed reporting.
SEE ALSO:
New Orleans removes a tribute to ‘the lost cause of the Confederacy’ — with snipers standing by [The
Washington Post, 2017-04-24]
New Orleans removes first of four statues deemed racially offensive [Reuters, 2017-04-24]
New Orleans takes down white supremacist monument [The Associated Press, 2017-04-24]
New Orleans begins controversial removal of Confederate monuments [CNN, 2017-04-24]
Discrimination
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/6a36eec532044a37b6b55faf10ede735/court-employers-can-pay-women-lessbased-past-salaries
Court: Employers can pay women less based on past salaries
By Sudhin Thanawala
The Associated Press, April 27, 2017
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Employers can legally pay women less than men for the same work based on
differences in the workers' previous salaries, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower-court ruling that said pay
differences based exclusively on prior salaries were discriminatory under the federal Equal Pay Act.
That's because women's earlier salaries are likely to be lower than men's because of gender bias, U.S.
Magistrate Judge Michael Seng said in a 2015 decision.
A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit cited a 1982 ruling by the court that said employers could use
previous salary information as long as they applied it reasonably and had a business policy that justified it.
"This decision is a step in the wrong direction if we're trying to really ensure that women have work
opportunities of equal pay," said Deborah Rhode, who teaches gender equity law at Stanford Law School.
"You can't allow prior discriminatory salary setting to justify future ones or you perpetuate the
discrimination."
Activists held rallies around the country earlier this month on Equal Pay Day to highlight the wage gap
between men and women. Women made about 80 cents for every dollar men earned in 2015, according to
U.S. government data.
The 9th Circuit ruling came in a lawsuit by a California school employee, Aileen Rizo, who learned in
2012 while having lunch with her colleagues that her male counterparts were making more than she was.
Her lawyer, Dan Siegel, said he had not yet decided the next step, but he could see the case going to the
U.S. Supreme Court because other appeals courts have decided differently.
"The logic of the decision is hard to accept," he said. "You're OK'ing a system that perpetuates the inequity
in compensation for women."
Fresno County public schools hired Rizo as a math consultant in 2009 for $63,000 a year. The county had a
standard policy that added 5 percent to her previous pay as a middle school math teacher in Arizona. But
that was not enough to meet the minimum salary for her position, so the county bumped her up.
The Equal Pay Act, signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, forbids employers from paying
women less than men based on sex for equal work performed under similar working conditions. But it
creates exemptions when pay is based on seniority, merit, quantity or quality of work or "any other factor
other than sex."
The county argued that basing starting salaries primarily on previous pay prevents subjective
determinations of a new employee's value. The 5 percent bump encourages candidates to leave their
positions to work for the county, it said.
The 9th Circuit sent the case back to Seng to consider that and other justifications the county provided for
using previous salaries.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/nyregion/new-york-subway-disability-lawsuit.html
New York City’s Subway System Violates Local and Federal
Laws, Disability Groups Say
By Eli Rosenberg
The New York Times, April 25, 2017
An elevated subway station in Brooklyn. More than 75 percent of
New York’s subway stations are not accessible to disabled people, a
lawsuit says. (Credit: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority discriminates against
people with disabilities because of its widespread lack of elevators
and electric lifts in the subway system, rendering it significantly
more inaccessible than other cities with large public transportation
systems, according to two lawsuits filed on Tuesday.
The plaintiffs, a group of disability organizations and disabled residents who brought the lawsuits as a class
action in state and federal court, say that the city’s subway system is one of the least accessible public
transportation systems in the United States, with the lowest accessibility rate — 24 percent — among the
country’s 10 largest transit systems.
More than 75 percent of the city’s 472 subway stations do not have elevators, lifts or other methods that
make them accessible for people who use wheelchairs, mobility devices or are otherwise unable to use
stairs. Of the approximately 112 stations that are designated as wheelchair-accessible, only 100 currently
offer working elevator service for passengers traveling in different directions, the lawsuits charge. (The
MTA said that 117 of its stations are accessible to people with disabilities.)
The lack of elevator service in the city’s subway system has been a longstanding problem. Michelle A.
Caiola, the litigation director for Disability Rights Advocates, which is representing the plaintiffs, said the
legal challenge comes after many futile attempts to achieve a resolution with the transit agency.
“We’ve talked to the M.T.A. on multiple occasions,” she said. “There is not any interest in any long-term
plan to address the inaccessibility.”
The state lawsuit, which focuses on a lack of elevators in the system, argues that the transit agency violates
the city’s human rights law, whose aim is to “eliminate and prevent discrimination from playing any role in
actions relating to employment, public accommodations and housing and other real estate, and to take other
actions against prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, discrimination and bias-related violence or harassment.”
The federal lawsuit says that the transit agency’s failure to maintain operable elevators violates
the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discriminating against people with disabilities in
public facilities.
While relatively newer transit systems in Washington and San Francisco are completely accessible, even
older subway systems have significantly higher rates of accessibility: Boston’s rate is 74 percent,
Philadelphia’s 68 percent and Chicago’s 67 percent, according to the court complaint.
New York City’s sprawling subway system never closes, and it has the highest number of stations of any
city in the world. Beth DeFalco, an agency spokeswoman, said that the agency could not comment on
litigation but that it was “committed to serving the needs of disabled customers.”
She said the agency was spending more than $1 billion to bring 25 more stations into compliance with the
federal disabilities act and an additional $334 million to replace existing elevators and escalators in the
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/nyregion/new-york-subway-disability-lawsuit.html
coming years. The authority believes it would cost about $10 billion to bring the remainder of the system in
line with the federal law.
Christopher A. Pangilinan, 34, a program director at a transportation foundation in Manhattan’s financial
district who uses a wheelchair and is one of the plaintiffs named in the lawsuits, commutes every day on
the subway from his home in Downtown Brooklyn.
A lack of lifts affects both his work and personal life. He takes a different subway line uptown after work in
order to catch another line back to Brooklyn to reach a station with an elevator for southbound commuters.
He said he regularly cancels social engagements if he finds there is no viable way to travel to a station with
a working elevator. And he has counted more than 200 elevator failures in the last two and a half years —
about one for every eight trips he takes, he said.
“This is a city that truly I do feel disabled in,” Mr. Pangilinan said. “If everything was working 100 percent,
and had elevators, my disability would be transparent. It wouldn’t limit me. But because of the lack of
elevators, my disability really comes to the forefront in terms of what activities I can engage in, in the city.
It’s tough psychologically to be reminded of that.”
The authority said that its elevators and escalators are not available 100 percent of the time because they
have to be shut down periodically for maintenance.
The state lawsuit lists many local landmarks that require longer trips for people needing elevator access,
including Columbia University’s main campus, Hunter College, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Brooklyn
Hospital Center, Citi Field, the New York Stock Exchange, the Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn
Museum and Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The lawsuits do not demand financial remedies, but instead seek better procedures to deal with elevator
maintenance and a long-term plan to increase accessibility, Ms. Caiola said.
Disability Rights Advocates recently filed another lawsuit against New York State and the conservancy that
runs the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, charging that some of the park’s features exclude
disabled people. In 2013, it was one of a handful of groups that reached a settlement with the city to ensure
that half of the city’s yellow cab fleet would eventually become wheelchair accessible.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-technologies-labor-idUSKBN17R2VP
Palantir settles U.S. lawsuit charging bias against Asians
By Eric Beech and David Alexander
Reuters, April 25, 2017
Alex Karp co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies speaks at
the WSJD Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, U.S.,
October 26, 2016. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)
The data analytics and security company Palantir Technologies Inc
has agreed to pay nearly $1.7 million to resolve charges it
discriminated against Asian applicants for engineering jobs at its
Palo Alto, California, office, the U.S. Labor Department said on
Tuesday.
Palantir, a privately owned data firm best known for helping the U.S. government track down al Qaeda
leader Osama bin Laden, entered into a consent decree under which it will pay $1.7 million back wages and
other funds, including the value of stock options, to several people, the department said.
The company also will offer jobs to eight people, the statement said. Palantir has disputed the Labor
Department's allegations but said in a statement it agreed to settle the case in order to get on with its
business.
"We disagree with the allegations made by the Department of Labor. We settled this matter, without any
admission of liability, in order to focus on our work. We continue to stand by our employment record and
are glad to have resolved this case," Palantir said in the statement.
Palantir, considered one of the most secretive firms in Silicon Valley, does highly confidential work for
U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, helping them track down terrorists and uncover financial fraud.
Its data mining system, which uses algorithms to search for patterns and connections, was deployed to help
the government track down bin Laden.
Palantir has been a party to U.S. government contracts worth more than $340 million since January 2010,
according to the Labor Department's lawsuit.
The company raised $880 million in funding in 2015 and was estimated to have a valuation of about $20
billion at that time, making it one of the highest-valued, venture-backed private tech companies in the
world.
(Reporting by Eric Beech and David Alexander; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Diversity
http://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/578862/secaf-introduces-diversity-initiatives/
AF releases implementation plans for latest diversity,
inclusion initiatives
By Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs
U.S. Air Force News, April 25, 2017
WASHINGTON (AFNS)—Headquarters Air Force released finalized implementation plans following the
second notification to Airmen relaying new diversity and inclusion initiatives on April 9, 2017.
Diversity and inclusion efforts have been a fundamental priority for the Air Force in addressing today’s
ever evolving national security challenges, the memo explained.
According to Air Force leadership, creating and fostering this environment of diversity and inclusion will
enhance the ability to recruit from the broadest possible pool of talent, solve the toughest challenges, and
engage the full power of an innovative force.
The memo summarizes the implementations for 13 initiatives including efforts to provide additional
support to geographically-separated military spouses, lengthen the early separation decision window for
female Airmen having children, establish diverse slates for key military development positions, promote
civilian participation in professional development programs, and better market career fields that currently
lack diversity to female and minority populations.
The Air Force has made continuous efforts toward enhancing diversity and inclusion throughout the force,
including nine initiatives launched in 2015 to help build teams comprised of individuals with diverse
backgrounds, experiences and demographics. However, Air Force leaders acknowledged work remains to
ensure continued success.
In September 2016, Air Force senior leaders released the second memorandum to Airmen relaying new
diversity and inclusion initiatives; the additional information on the initiatives aligns with Defense
Department diversity efforts and recognizes the strength of the force will always be in its people.
The Air Force will continue to look holistically at talent management processes for opportunities to ensure
the Air Force is an employer of choice for the nation’s best and brightest talent and capitalizes on the
unique contributions of all Airmen, Air Force leadership said.
For additional information on the initiatives, Airmen are encouraged to speak with their chain of command
and force support squadrons. For specific personnel guidance related to each initiative, Airmen should go
to myPers. Individuals who do not have a myPers account can request one by following these instructions.
http://dataomaha.com/bigstory/story/130
Transgender Offutt airman – finally 'able to live as my
true self' – finds support, acceptance during transition
By Steve Liewer
The World-Herald (Omaha, Neb.), April 24, 2017
For years Ashleigh Buch hid the fact that she was transgender.
The Offutt airman reported to work each day as a man, telling
colleagues little about her life. Off the base, in her Omaha
apartment, above, she lived as a woman, donning wigs over the
hair she kept trimmed short. But as part of a wave of social
change to hit the military, the Air Force instructor’s days of
appearing one way at work and another at home are over.
(Photo: Sarah Hoffman)
In front of an Offutt classroom of young airmen, Staff Sgt. Ashleigh Buch is a dynamo. She laughs and
jokes as she mentors students fresh out of language school, teaching them about the demanding work
of an RC-135 reconnaissance crew member.
Her students are new linguists whose jobs involve listening to communications during overseas
surveillance missions.
Buch’s also a busy social director for her squadron — president of the unit’s booster club and chair of
the Women’s History Month commemoration.
“She means the world to this unit,” said Lt. Col. David “Bo” Rice, the 338th Combat Training
Squadron commander.
But until last fall, Buch reported to work as a shy, stressed man.
For years, Buch hid the fact that she was transgender — a group of people who, until last summer,
could be legally excluded from serving in the military.
On Monday through Friday, she donned her olive-drab flight suit and worked as a male airman at
Offutt, her hair trimmed short, answering to the boy’s name her parents gave her at birth. She was
reserved, telling colleagues little about her life.
Nights and weekends, she pulled out her skinny jeans, a cute top and ankle booties and head ed out with
friends to Lalibela Ethiopian restaurant for dinner or to hang out at Culprit, a downtown bakery, for
brunch.
“It was always a very difficult thing, being constantly on guard,” Buch said in an interview. “It was a
really scary time.”
Those years of appearing male at work while living as a woman at home are over. In October, Buch,
32, switched her gender from “male” to “female” in the Air Force’s personnel records system,
reflecting changes already made to her birth certificate and passport.
In so doing, she became the first Offutt Air Force Base airman to transition under the Defense
Department’s new policy, finalized last June, allowing transgender service members to serve openly,
and providing them with medical care.
In years past, transgender service members could be discharged from the military because they were
considered to be mentally unfit.
http://dataomaha.com/bigstory/story/130
Buch is part of the latest wave of societal change to hit the military. In 2011, gay and lesbian service
members were allowed to serve openly for the first time with the end of the “don’t ask, don’t tell”
policy, following congressional action and a federal court ruling. During 2015 and 2016, the last maleonly combat jobs were opened to women. The end of the transgender ban followed last June.
Not everyone has welcomed the changes. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., an Iraq War veteran who’s on
the House Armed Services Committee, said in November that President Donald Trump should halt the
new transgender policy, calling it “ridiculous.”
“Overturn it immediately, because it doesn’t make any sense,” Hunter said in an interview with the
Washington Times. “How does that help you fight and win wars?”
While campaigning before a group of retired service members last fall, Trump was asked his opinion of
recent policy changes regarding women in combat units and transgender service members.
“We’re going to get away from political correctness,” Trump said, drawing applause. “We’re going to
have to do that.”
But Trump also said he would defer to his top military leaders on specific policies. And his defense
secretary, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis — who had expressed skepticism about the new policies in
a book he co-edited last year — said during confirmation hearings in January he wasn’t interested in
changing things unless the service chiefs show him proven problems.
“I’m not going in with the idea that I am going to review these and right away start rolling something
back,” Mattis said.
Compared with the decades of controversy over the presence of openly gay troops in the U.S. military,
the lifting of the transgender restrictions has caused less debate.
Buch said her fellow airmen treated her kindly during her transition, which was chronicled last fall in
an article for Offutt’s base newspaper.
“It’s been so worth it,” she said. “People have been so supportive.”
Her commanders, too, said they received no pushback from within the unit. Other Air Force leaders, in
fact, have sought their advice on how to work with transgender airmen in their own units.
“Everybody was pretty accepting that she was a part of the family,” said Chief Master Sgt. Stephen
Mallette, the 338th’s chief enlisted manager.
A Pentagon spokesman said the Defense Department hasn’t tracked the number of transgender service
members since the policy change. The Rand Corp., in a 2016 study prepared for the Pentagon,
estimated the number of transgender active-duty and reserve service members at between 2,150 and
10,790, though another study put the number higher.
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Blake Dremann, who heads SPART*A, an advocacy group for transgender service
members, estimated that about 1,000 are transitioning right now.
“I know it’s happening,” Dremann said. “Things are moving slowly, but they’re moving.”
Buch hopes her experience can help other transgender service members. She agreed to tell her story,
but she asked that her former male name not be used and her image before her transition not be shown.
“I am a woman, and I do not identify with that name at all,” she said. “All it does is it reminds me of a
time in my life when I didn’t feel as though I was able to live as my true self.”
http://dataomaha.com/bigstory/story/130
Buch said her gender mismatch is something she has lived with since she was very young, growing up
in the town of Fairfield, Iowa. By age 3, she was dressing up in girl’s clothes. She liked playing house
with her cousins, all of whom were girls.
“I would always want to be the mother, and nobody would let me,” Buch recalled, laughing.
The movie “Titanic” came out in 1997 when she was in middle school, and Buch was taken with the
beautiful co-star — but it wasn’t an adolescent crush. She wanted to be her.
“I’m pretty sure not many other seventh-grade boys were obsessed with Kate Winslet’s dresses,” she
said. “I wanted to wear them. I identified so strongly with her.”
That was also the year Buch first heard about transgender people. She searched online for information
on hormone therapy, which would suppress her male hormones while she received injections of female
hormones.
But Buch was petrified to bring it up with her parents or three siblings. She didn’t confess her feelings
to anyone until after she had graduated from college.
“I ended up trying to be this person I wasn’t,” she said. “There was this internal battle — knowing I
was a girl, but outwardly people seeing me as a boy.”
After graduating from high school in 2003, she moved to Ames to attend Iowa State University, where
she earned a degree in Spanish and secondary education. She wanted to be a high school teacher.
“That’s where my heart is, my passion,” she said. “With teaching.”
But Buch wanted real-life experience first. So after college, in 2009, she enlisted in the Air Force,
where she learned she could become a linguist. She studied at the Defense Language Institute in
Monterey, California.
She also hoped that what she expected would be a highly masculine environment might somehow help
to calm her conflicted feelings about her gender identity.
Following a tour in Texas, Buch came to Offutt in 2012 and became a teacher. Her job at the 338th is
to instruct new crew members about their jobs on the 55th Wing’s RC-135 reconnaissance jets. She
teaches in the classroom at Offutt, aboard jets and during deployments overseas.
But nothing about the military made her feel more “male.”
“It only got worse,” Buch said. “It was so difficult balancing my own identity I was trying so hard to
suppress with being this ideal masculine person.”
Around the time Buch arrived at Offutt, she began the slow transition to living as a woman while off duty. She was now senior enough to live off base. She chose downtown Omaha mostly because she
liked the lively urban lifestyle, but also partly because she could build a life as “Ashleigh” away from
the Air Force.
“I wanted to be part of a community that was not military 24/7,” Buch said. “I like being able to walk
to a coffee shop, or a restaurant. Downtown was exactly what I wanted.”
She guarded her secret carefully, coming out only to a few friends. Outside of work, Buch avoided
most social events with fellow airmen who weren’t clued in. She stayed as far away from Offutt as
possible.
“I would do everything I could to avoid going south of Chandler Road,” she said, referring to a street
near the border between Omaha and Bellevue. “I didn’t want to be seen by anyone.”
http://dataomaha.com/bigstory/story/130
It wasn’t foolproof. Once, at her favorite downtown bakery, she ran into a fellow airman named Bryan
Osorio. He knew her only as a man. On this day, she was wearing a wig, makeup and magnetic
earrings.
“He kind of heard me talking. He finally came to the table,” Buch said.
Osorio chatted with her for a few minutes. He didn’t comment on the way she looked. Buch sighed
with relief when he left.
Osorio, 26, who has left the Air Force but still lives in Omaha, said he wasn’t disturbed by the
encounter.
“I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but she had been my running coach,” he said. “It was, just,
‘Hey, I’m running into her as a friend.’”
Osorio said he noticed after they reconnected at Offutt that Buch wore nail polish and women’s
training clothes when they were working out.
“People talk. There’s gossipy, rumory stuff. I think some people thought she was a gay male,” he said .
Once she came out, her colleagues understood.
“She’s like she was before, but more friendly and outgoing,” Osorio said.
Buch came out to her family during that time by writing letters to her parents, her two brothers and her
sister. She chose that approach over a face-to-face conversation because she thought it would give
them some time to absorb the information without forcing them to react immediately to her revelation
in person.
“That was very hard to do,” she said. “But everyone was super loving and supportive. ”
Buch’s cousin Carrie Kirlauski said she and Buch were close growing up. When the two of them
reconnected via Facebook several years ago, Kirlauski, 35, noticed her cousin looking increasingly
feminine in photos.
“She started making physical changes,” Kirlauski said. “By the time she came out, it was not a
surprise.”
That was by design. Buch managed her social media presence carefully. She kept her Facebook page
under her male name as she began her transition. But from time to time she posted articles and
comments supporting transgender rights, as well as photos of herself looking more androgynous .
Buch also created a new but discreet “Ashleigh” page that she shared only with those she trusted most.
“I wouldn’t use my last name. I was very choosy who I added to my Facebook page,” she said .
In 2015, Buch faced a difficult decision over whether to re-enlist in the Air Force at the end of her first
six-year commitment. Staying in meant continuing to live in the closet, at least for a while. That year,
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced plans to study the future of the policy, and he halted the
expulsion of service members solely for being transgender, but he didn’t say when the policy might be
changed.
She decided to stay in anyway. Buch had started hormone treatments, which she paid for out of pocket.
If she quit the Air Force, she would have no job, no medical coverage, no money. And she would face
the prospect of getting a job in the civilian world, where legal protections for transgender people were
also uncertain.
http://dataomaha.com/bigstory/story/130
“There’s not many protections for LGBT and trans people,” Buch said. Plus, she added, “It ended up, I
really liked being on deployment and making some amazing friends.”
In November 2015, after returning from a vacation in which she had been completely “out” as a woman,
Buch went back to work. Depressed and weepy, she confided to her flight commander, Capt. Tiffany
Werner, that she was transgender. They worked side by side, and Ashleigh trusted her.
“She was an open and caring person,” Buch said.
She also knew Werner was gay and had served during the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era.
Werner said she felt honored that Buch had confided in her.
“I tried to create an environment that was open and accepting,” said Werner, who transferred last summer
to a base in Texas. “I’m married to a woman. Everyone knows my family. That made it feel safe.”
Werner knew that being transgender no longer automatically disqualified Buch from service, so she saw no
reason to tell her own commanders.
“I had never received any counseling or guidance about what to do,” Werner said. “But I had been
mentored about what to do when an airman comes to you with something personal.”
Three months later, though, Buch’s story did come out.
After notifying her own commanders, Werner called Buch for a meeting. Ashleigh brought a notebook,
thinking they would be discussing how Buch could cope during an upcoming deployment, which would be
her first since starting hormone therapy.
“So, we’re not here for the reason you think we are,” Werner told her.
Instead, she revealed that someone in the unit had discovered a letter Buch had written on her lunch hour to
a deployed friend. The letter, which Buch had inadvertently placed on a shared drive while she changed
offices, revealed that she was transgender.
“My heart dropped,” Buch said. “I was filled with a sense of dread.”
Although then-Defense Secretary Carter had halted the expulsion of service members solely for being
transgender, she thought her commanders could probably find a reason to dismiss her if they wanted to.
Short of that, they could order her to stop her transition.
“I would have felt the same, in her shoes,” Werner said. “There’s a difference between a policy that
explicitly welcomes a group, and the absence of a policy. It’s the fear of the unknown.”
Rice, the commander, said he knew nothing about gender dysphoria — when a person’s sex and gender
identity don’t match — until learning of Buch’s situation. But he knew she was one of his top instructors,
and he didn’t want to lose her.
“I wanted to get smart on the policy, get smart on the issues, to figure out what we could do as her
leadership to put her in a position to excel,” Rice said.
Werner did her best to reassure Buch. The 338th was a family, Werner said, and it would support her.
“I didn’t want her to lose the faith that she had in me,” Werner said.
Buch cried with relief.
“Just knowing they were in my corner — that was huge,” she said. “The knowledge that I no longer had to
be hidden was a huge weight off of my shoulders. Being outed ended up as a blessing in disguise.”
http://dataomaha.com/bigstory/story/130
Still, she continued to go to work as a man. Buch’s commanders knew rules were coming about dress
codes, bathrooms, ID cards and physical training tests — but nothing had come down from the Pentagon
yet.
Her commanders began holding weekly meetings with Buch. They urged her to be patient while they went
through the process of securing “exceptions to policy” that would let her serve as a transgender woman.
Because her hormone therapy had already begun, appearing male became more difficult. Word got out
within the squadron, but there was little drama.
“Everybody was really cool about it,” she said.
After the Pentagon announced new rules in June, she got a new birth certificate, new passport, and military
documents identifying her as Ashleigh — a name she chose because she learned it’s what her parents had
planned to name a daughter.
“It’s been so worth it,” Buch said. “I was able to do my hair the way I wanted. I got my ears pierced.”
She was taken off flight status for medical reasons as her hormone therapy began. The treatments have cost
about $120 a month out of her own pocket, though she expects the military’s Tricare medical plan to take
over now that transgender service members may serve openly.
In late October, Buch traveled to Dayton, Ohio, and passed a battery of physical and psychological tests
that were required because medical issues involving transgender service members are still so new to the Air
Force. Months later, she is still waiting for confirmation that she can fly again.
Besides work, Buch’s focus now is on her own life, which has completely changed.
Kirlauski said her formerly shy cousin is now social and outgoing. They can do things together they
couldn’t before, like painting their nails and getting facials together.
“She wanted to do all the girly things,” Kirlauski said. “Ashleigh’s kind of going through puberty again,
but as a fully functioning adult.”
Since Defense Secretary Mattis stated his opposition in January to undoing the policy, speculation about a
repeal has died down.
Nathaniel Frank, an LGBT historian and scholar at Columbia University Law School, said military leaders
have told him they appreciate the new policy because, for the first time, it makes clear how to handle
transgender troops.
In a short time, he added, gay and lesbian service members have become part of the military’s fabric. Soon,
transgender troops will, too.
“It would be very difficult and very chaotic to roll this back,” Frank said. “The policy is being
implemented. The cake is baked.”
Buch is not allowing herself to think about the possibility that Congress or the Trump administration might
reverse the transgender policy.
“Right now, I know the policy is that I can be open, be trans,” she said. “I want to be the best airman I can,
now.”
Miscellaneous
https://www.armytimes.com/articles/army-secretary-nominee-addresses-lgbt-controversy-on-facebook
Army secretary nominee addresses LGBT controversy on
Facebook
By Meghann Myers
Army Times, April 26, 2017
(Photo Credit: Erik Schelzig/AP)
Since President Trump nominated Tennessee State Sen. Mark
Green, R-Clarksville, to be the next Army secretary, controversy
has swirled concerning his legislative efforts and public remarks
regarding the LGBT community.
Even before his April 7 nomination announcement, there were
multiple media reports about the outspokenly religious lawmaker's past comments, and they have not since
let up. On Tuesday, Green took to his official Facebook page to refute the stories.
As of April 26, Congress had not received Green's nomination from the White House, according to the
congressional record.
Green and a representative for the senator did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
The Facebook post stemmed from recent stories in the Huffington Post, The Tennessean and USA Today,
which quoted his appearance on Blog Talk Radio in 2016.
During the course of that interview, which covered both transgender bathroom laws as well as fighting
ISIS, Green said that his job as a public official is to "crush evil."
The government exists to honor those people who live honorably, who do good things – to reward people
who behave well and to crush evil. So that means as a state senator, my responsibility very clearly in
Romans 13 is to create an environment where people who do right are rewarded and the people who do
wrong are crushed. Evil is crushed. So I’m going to protect women in their bathrooms, and I’m going to
protect our state against potential infiltration from the Syrian ISIS people in the refugee program. And
whoever wants to stand up and take me on that, I’m ready to fight.
In context, he was talking about the possibility that rapists would take advantage of transgender bathroom
laws — which allow people to use the restroom of the gender with which they identify — to prey on
women.
"There are 300,000 rapes in the United States every year,” Green said earlier in the interview. “Three
hundred thousand women who are sexually assaulted by predators. We know this. It’s documented. It’s
factual. To think that some young guy isn’t going to take advantage of the system where we’re going to
allow guys to go into the bathroom ― the women’s bathroom ― to think that it’s not going to happen is
just ridiculous.”
Some — including transgender Olympic gold medalist Caitlin Jenner, who spoke out against him in a
Monday appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight — have taken his statements to mean that he thinks
transgender people are evil and must be crushed.
LGBT advocates have also called out Green for supporting a Tennessee law that would require local
governments to do business with private companies regardless of whether their human resources policies
allow discrimination against LGBT employees.
https://www.armytimes.com/articles/army-secretary-nominee-addresses-lgbt-controversy-on-facebook
The senator has also been quoted suggesting that the Tennessee governor refuse to issue licenses for samesex marriage because the state did not vote to support it, as well as referring to transgenderism as a disease
in a September speech to the Chattanooga Tea Party.
Green, a West Point grad and former flight surgeon with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment,
was referring to outdated information from the American Psychiatric Association.
In 2011, the organization updated its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to remove
"gender identity disorder" and replace it with "gender dysphoria," a type of distress that some — but not all
— transgender people experience.
In an April 11 statement provided to Army Times, Green said he did not intend to bring his personal
feelings to his role as civilian leader of the Army.
"I was nominated by President Trump to do one job: serve as his secretary of the Army," he said. "If
confirmed, I will solely focus on making recommendations to him on how to keep our country safe and
secure. Politics will have nothing to do with it."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/us/politics/fact-check-women-register-for-draft.html
Do Women Have to Register for the Draft? No. But
Misinformation Spreads.
By Linda Qiu
The New York Times, April 26, 2017
Marine recruits in line during boot camp on Parris Island, S.C., in
2013. An outdated New York Times article is being shared on social
media to suggest that women are required to register for the draft.
(Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Women do not have to register for the United States draft. And no
American has been pressed into involuntary service since the last
draft, during the Vietnam War.
However, the viral spread of a 10-month-old New York Times story has potentially given millions of
internet users misleading impressions to the contrary. Following the web traffic and social media
commentary around the article illustrates how a hot-button cultural issue can be taken out of context and
amplified by hyperpartisan bubbles, inflaming passions and spreading misinformation.
On June 14, 2016, The Times published a story online with the headline, “Senate Votes to Require Women
to Register for the Draft.” The story reported on the approval of a budget amendment by the Senate. The
final version of the bill, which President Barack Obama signed six months later, in December, did not
include the provision.
In late January 2017, the article was shared by several Facebook pages in the military community, leading
to an increase in traffic. In April, after President Trump launched a strike on a Syrian air base, fan pages for
Senator Bernie Sanders spurred a smaller spike in readership. In total, nearly 2 million people have clicked
on this 2016 congressional procedural story, making it one of the 100 most-read Times stories of 2017 so
far. And Google Trends data shows an obvious bump in searches for questions like “Do women have to
register for the draft?” around the spikes in viral social sharing.
A scan of the thousands of
comments left on the different
Facebook posts reveals
obvious confusion. Some
readers, responding only to
the dated headline, are under
the impression that Congress
recently voted to draft their
daughters or, alternatively, to
finally move the army toward
greater gender equality.
Planting the seeds of passion
In a way, the ideological confusion online channels the passion that brought the issue under congressional
consideration in the first place.
The Obama administration opened combat roles to women back in December 2015, stirring a national
conversation that, as demonstrated by the article’s resurgent popularity, has continued to this day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/us/politics/fact-check-women-register-for-draft.html
Representative Duncan D. Hunter, Republican of California, introduced the initial amendment to expand
the draft to women in April 2016, but voted against it. Mr. Hunter introduced it to “force the conversation”
in Congress about the administration’s new policy, said his chief of staff, Joe Kasper.
Though the amendment passed 32-30 in the House Armed Services Committee, Claude Chafin, a
spokesman for the committee, told The Times it was clear it would not survive a vote by the full House. So
the provision was taken out of the House version of the bill. And while the amendment passed the Senate, it
was ultimately stripped out of the final Senate version of the bill as well. Instead, the final law, as passed in
December, established a national commission to study the draft’s “utility and future use.”
Old story, new context
Fast forward to this month. Mr. Trump ordered airstrikes in Syria amid heightened tension with North
Korea and Russia. The liberal Facebook page “Bernie Sanders Lover” shared a link to the June story
without additional comment.
The page’s administrator, Chris Friend, told The Times that he was reminded of the earlier story and shared
it with his readers after the Syria strikes for a reason.
Mr. Friend said he understood that the amendment was stripped from the final legislation, “but to me, it is a
bigger story that it was included in the first place and that people missed the story. Personally, I’ve been
feeling a ramp-up for a large-scale conflict for a while now.”
While Mr. Friend had a bigger picture in mind, he said that many of his readers were incensed by the
article, suggesting that a “white, male, dominant, Christian, warmongering” Congress wanted to send “your
sons and daughters to fight for Trump’s cause.”
Mr. Friend, essentially, had given old news a new context — a not uncommon phenomenon in the digital
age, said Peter Adams, senior vice president for educational programs at the News Literacy Project.
Multiple studies have shown that most news consumers seldom read entire articles. For many, in this new
and continuously expanding information landscape, a glance is enough to confirm existing biases and
emotions.
“They think they know what it’s about, based on the headline,” Mr. Adams said. “Fear can drive people to
share quickly and not think as much or be as critical. That’s where it gets its virality.”
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/fl-rkoped-holocaust-remembrance-20170424-story.html
Holocaust remembrance reaches beyond just one day
[OPINION]
Yom HaShoah's universal message—We must teach the Holocaust, not repeat it.
By Rositta Kenigsberg
Sun Sentinel (South Florida), April 24, 2017
On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, we the children of survivors are reminded that this day,
for our beloved parents, the survivors of the Holocaust, is more than a remembrance of the devastation and
despair.
Today is more than a remembrance of the apathy and indifference, more than a remembrance of the
deportations, the executions, the mass-graves, the trains, the death camps. It's about more than the gas
chambers, the mute prayers, the burning Torah scrolls; the once vibrant and flourishing communities and
towns, the hunger, the starvation, the young, the old, the rich, the poor; the ghetto fighters and partisans, the
scribe in Lublin, the yeshiva student in Vilna, the artist in Kracow, the musician in Warsaw, their families,
grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters and the murder of the beautiful and innocent 1.5 million children,
whose lives and dreams were never realized.
Yom HaShoah is also the time and moment to reflect and be reminded of our survivors' universal message
and warning that if we are to be free of Auschwitz and its shadows, we cannot "let their past become our
future and we must teach the Holocaust, not repeat it."
We also know only too well that racial hatred, complacency and complicity are still very evident, even in
our most progressive societies today. We know that Nazi war criminals still remain in our midst and that
pseudo historians are deliberately distorting, denying and de-Judaizing the authentic memory of the
Holocaust.
For the past 72 years our parents, the survivors, continue to raise an alarm. The symbols of evil, which they
hoped were destroyed with the ideas that developed them, are being seen and used more frequently than
ever before. The swastika appears with increasing frequency on public or religious buildings around the
globe, and more and more of our youth are joining groups pledged to the ideals that were spouted in 1939,
even though these so-called ideals nullify and distort everything our American Constitution and Bill of
Rights represents.
Lest, we consider as "pranks" the painting of Nazi symbols or other vicious pictures and remarks on
buildings, or consider as innocent, the slurs cast out on groups different from us, survivors remind us that is
exactly how the Holocaust began. The atrocity did not begin with the ovens in the concentration camps —
it ended there. It did not begin with the mass murder of hundreds, thousands and then millions of innocent
people — it ended there. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that we are devoid of formidable threats,
nor let us even for one moment ignore what is happening around us.
Our survivors beseech us to not allow the Holocaust to be diluted, distorted, or denied. Not diminish its
meaning by treating every terrible suffering and every instance of persecution and discrimination as a miniHolocaust. In the face of today's climate do not be silent: stand up and speak out when the history of the
Holocaust is being misrepresented by the misguided and ill-intentioned.
That is why today the Holocaust Documentation & Education Center, Inc., which has been in existence as a
nonprofit, non-denominational organization for 37 years, is embarking on an urgent, vital and timely
endeavor: the building of the first South Florida Holocaust Museum. The museum will also become the
first in North America to tell the story in English and Spanish, and will not only educate generations to
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/fl-rkoped-holocaust-remembrance-20170424-story.html
come in our community, but also will expand our mission well beyond our borders as we continue to
preserve, protect, and perpetuate the authentic memory of the Holocaust. The need for this museum could
not be more urgent, timely, and crucial.
Today, we find ourselves facing the following frightening truths:
• There is an alarming resurgence of anti-Semitism in our country and around the globe.
• Virulent Holocaust denial is on the rise.
• The generation of our beloved Survivors is rapidly diminishing.
• South Florida is home to the world's 3rd largest Survivor population and they have one wish and that is to
see this Museum built while they are still alive.
For more than three decades, the center has aggressively confronted hatred, prejudice, bullying, and
violence. But we need to do more. That is why we are building this museum so that we can endow this
"legacy of remembrance" for all our children and grandchildren so they will know and understand that the
meaning of "NEVER AGAIN" is more than keeping the memories alive. It is making these memories in
our museum profoundly relevant lessons so that each and everyone one of us who enters will leave
knowing that although what was, we cannot change, but what will be we can. We have learned that what
we do matters, and what we don't do also matters. Every life is worthy of life.
In the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in
moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." It is
vital to note that it is up to all of us to be vigilant and remember the Holocaust, not just on Yom HaShoah,
but every day forward.
Rositta Kenigsberg is president of the Holocaust Documentation & Education Center, in Dania Beach.
SEE ALSO:
Thousands march in Auschwitz Holocaust remembrance event [The Washington Post, 2017-04-24]
[VIDEO]
Thousands at Auschwitz for yearly Holocaust memorial event [The Associated Press, 2017-04-24]
Holocaust Remembrance Day Observed Around The World [CBS New York, 2017-04-24]
Ceremonies mark liberation of 2 Nazi camps 72 years ago [The Associated Press, 2017-04-23]
https://www.apnews.com/3f9e8e04b4cb453396c1d22e82aeaa46/Official:-VA-sees-curbing-veteransuicides-as-top-priority
Official: VA sees curbing veteran suicides as top priority
By Susan Montoya Bryan
The Associated Press, April 21, 2017
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Curbing suicide among military veterans and boosting access to mental
health care are among the top priorities of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Deputy Secretary Scott
Blackburn said Friday.
Blackburn, an Army veteran, said staffing shortages when it comes to mental health and other specialties
were among the concerns he heard about while meeting with patients, doctors and others at New Mexico's
largest VA medical center.
Administrators acknowledged that recruiting psychiatrists has been a challenge in New Mexico and that the
shortage extends far beyond the VA system. The state currently has a shortage of about 130 psychiatrists
and needs dozens more primary care physicians to meet demand, officials said.
Blackburn said the VA has been busy trying to reimagine many of its processes and policies in hopes of
removing bureaucratic and logistical hurdles to care. He was among those who joined the VA in late 2014
as the agency began rebuilding itself following a scandal in which as many as 40 veterans died while
waiting months to be scheduled for appointments at the Phoenix VA medical center.
Long wait times were also documented at the Albuquerque medical center, but Blackburn said Friday that
progress has been made and the agency plans to keep moving forward with a program that allows veterans
to seek care in the private sector.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump signed legislation temporarily extending the Choice Program.
Blackburn pointed to the importance of veterans having options before he ticked off statistics related to
suicide.
About 20 veterans a day commit suicide. Statistics show that only six were part of the VA system, and only
three of those six had seen a mental health provider in the past couple of years, Blackburn said.
"If we as a country are serious about addressing this issue, we need to attack it from all angles and we need
to work together," he said. "This is something the VA won't be able to do all by itself. We're going to have
to partner with states, with cities, with nonprofits, with private health care systems, with whoever has an
interest in this."
Given the rural and personnel challenges in New Mexico and other Western states, Blackburn said
telemedicine will likely become a bigger part of reaching veterans in remote areas.
Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is among the doctors taking advantage of telemedicine. He sees
patients in Oregon from his office in Washington, D.C., Blackburn said.
"That's a great wave of the future," he said, noting that the VA is working with the White House and others
to tackle some of the federal restrictions that currently limit the ability of health providers to work remotely
and prescribe medications across state lines.
https://www.apnews.com/628c182d26ca4b35a1600ed8c50a27cb/Siren-wails-as-Israel-marks-annualHolocaust-Remembrance-Day
Siren wails as Israel marks annual Holocaust Remembrance
Day
By Aron Heller
The Associated Press, April 24, 2017
Israelis stand still next to their cars as a siren sounds in memory of
victims of the Holocaust, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, April 24,
2017. Israel has come to a standstill as people stopped in their
tracks for a two-minute siren that wailed across the country in
remembrance of the Holocaust's 6 million Jewish victims. (AP
Photo/ Sebastian Scheiner)
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel came to a standstill on Monday as
people stopped in their tracks for a two-minute siren that wailed
across the country in remembrance of the Holocaust's 6 million Jewish victims.
The ritual is the centerpiece of Israel's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day for those who were
systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Pedestrians stood in
place, buses stopped on busy streets and cars pulled over on major highways — their drivers standing on
the roads with their heads bowed.
In homes and businesses, people stopped what they were doing to pay homage to the victims of the Nazi
genocide, in which a third of world Jewry was annihilated.
A wreath laying ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial followed, with Israeli leaders and
Holocaust survivors in attendance. A public reading of names also took place in Israel's parliament, where
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders recited names of relatives who were killed. Other
ceremonies, prayers and musical performances took place in schools, community centers and army bases
around the country.
The annual remembrance is one of the most solemn days on Israel's calendar. Restaurants, cafes and places
of entertainment shut down, and radio and TV programs are dedicated almost exclusively to documentaries
about the Holocaust, interviews with survivors and somber music. The Israeli flag flew at half-staff.
Israel was established in 1948, just three years after the end of the war, and hundreds of thousands of
survivors fled there. Some 160,000 elderly survivors remain, with a similar number worldwide. With the
passing years, and the dwindling in numbers of survivors, greater emphasis has been put on
commemorating their individual stories.
The central theme of this year's commemorations at Yad Vashem is "Restoring Their Identities: The Fate of
the Individual During the Holocaust."
The Holocaust memorial called on the public to share testimony and provide more names of those who
perished. To date, Yad Vashem's Shoah Victims' Names Project has collected over 4,700,000 names of the
victims.
"It is a race against the clock to collect as many names of those murdered during the Holocaust before there
are no more survivors left," said Alexander Avram, the director of Vad Vashem's Hall of Names.
https://www.apnews.com/628c182d26ca4b35a1600ed8c50a27cb/Siren-wails-as-Israel-marks-annualHolocaust-Remembrance-Day
At the opening ceremony on Sunday night, Netanyahu spoke about what he said was the world's
indifference to the genocide of the Jews in World War II and how Israel is the guarantee the Jewish people
will never be that weak again.
"The lesson is that we must be able to defend ourselves by ourselves, against every threat, against every
enemy," he said.
President Reuven Rivlin took a different approach. He said although the Holocaust is "permanently
branded in our flesh" it "is not the lens through which we should examine our past and our future."
SEE ALSO:
'This was real': Artifacts save Holocaust stories for future [The Associated Press, 2017-04-25]
Holocaust Remembrance Day: Elie Wiesel on what makes us moral [Minnesota Public Radio, 2017-04-24]
Relative Shares Family’s Story On Holocaust Remembrance Day: ‘This Is Their History’ [CBS Miami,
2017-04-24]
Netanyahu on Holocaust: 'Hypocrisy is screaming to the sky' [USA TODAY, 2017-04-24]
Israel Museum Remembers Holocaust With New Message [The New York Times, 2017-04-23]
500 Years After Expulsion, Sicily’s Jews Reclaim a Lost History [The New York Times, 2017-04-24]
https://www.apnews.com/83dc0eead37e4d66b4e7562623347fa4/Trump-condemns-Holocaust-deniers
Trump condemns Holocaust deniers
By Vivian Salama and Darlene Superville
The Associated Press, April 26, 2017
President Donald Trump speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington,
Tuesday, April 25, 2017, during the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum's National Days of Remembrance ceremony.
(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pledging to confront anti-Semitism in all
its forms and to "never be silent," President Donald Trump on
Tuesday denounced as accomplices to "horrible evil" anyone who
denies that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
In a speech marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump also pledged that as president of the United
States he will "always stand with the Jewish people."
Trump spoke at a U.S. Capitol ceremony hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to mark the
unveiling of a new conservation and research center. The center will serve as a repository for a vast
collection of artifacts by those who survived Adolf Hitler's massacre of Jews during World War II.
Members of Congress and Holocaust survivors — whose strength and courage Trump said was an
inspiration — attended the emotional event in the Rotunda, the center of the Capitol. Survivors lit candles
at the end of the ceremony.
"Those who deny the Holocaust are an accomplice to this horrible evil and we'll never be silent. We just
won't," he said. "We will never, ever be silent in the face of evil again."
Trump said Holocaust denial is one form of "dangerous anti-Semitism that continues all around the world"
and that can be seen on university campuses, in attacks on Jewish communities "or when aggressors
threaten Israel with total and complete destruction."
"This is my pledge to you: We will confront anti-Semitism," he said. "We will stamp out prejudice, we will
condemn hatred, we will bear witness and we will act. As president of the United States, I will always stand
with the Jewish people and I will always stand with our great friend and partner, the state of Israel."
Trump's commemoration of the Holocaust follows a recent blunder by his chief spokesman, Sean Spicer,
on the issue.
Spicer recently apologized for making what he later said was an "inappropriate and insensitive" statement
earlier this month that compared Hitler to Syrian President Bashar Assad by suggesting that Hitler "didn't
even sink to using chemical weapons."
The remark, which Spicer had made days after a chemical attack in Syria killed scores of civilians, ignored
Hitler's use of gas chambers to kill Jews.
The White House's commitment to fighting anti-Semitism was questioned earlier in the year after it
released a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that excluded any mention of the
Jewish people, in contrast to similar statements from previous administrations.
Trump's own relations with American Jews had become strained after a testy exchange during a news
conference with a reporter for an Orthodox Jewish publication. Some also thought Trump had waited too
long to come out forcefully against bomb threats against Jewish community centers nationwide.
https://www.apnews.com/83dc0eead37e4d66b4e7562623347fa4/Trump-condemns-Holocaust-deniers
Trump's daughter, Ivanka Trump, converted to Judaism before marrying her husband, Jared Kushner, now
a senior White House adviser. On an official trip Tuesday to Berlin, Ivanka Trump, now working at the
White House as an assistant to the president, visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Addressing survivors in attendance at the Capitol, Trump called each one a "beacon of light."
"It only takes one light to illuminate even the darkest space, just like it takes only truth to crush a thousand
lies and one hero to change the course of history," he said. "We know that in the end good will triumph
over evil and that as long as we refuse to close our eyes or to silence our voices, we know that justice will
ultimately prevail."
SEE ALSO:
Watch: Trump remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's National Days of Remembrance [USA
TODAY, 2017-04-25] [VIDEO]
Misconduct
https://www.airforcetimes.com/articles/air-force-academy-gymnastics-hazing-investigation
Hazing on the academy’s gymnastics team: Cadets, coach
were punished after investigation
By Stephen Losey
Air Force Times, April 23, 2017
(Photo Credit: Ray McCoy/Air Force)
Atomic wedgies and atomic situps are usually the stuff of middleschool pranks — not the behavior of adults, aspiring officers
seeking to become part of the next generation of Air Force
leaders.
But a rash of hazing and other juvenile behavior on the Air Force
Academy’s men’s gymnastics team led to punishments of the coach and some cadets in 2014.
The commander-directed investigation — which the academy recently provided to Air Force Times in
response to a Freedom of Information Act request about overall hazing at the academy — uncovered
“hazing and physical maltreatment” of freshmen on the team, as one investigator described it. The academy
announced in September 2014 that the disciplinary actions — which included letters of counseling or
admonishment, verbal counseling, and probation — were due to a series of “incidents over the past year
[that] have revealed a pattern of unprofessional behavior and underage drinking by the men’s gymnastics
team.”
An academy official at the time would not say what “unprofessional behavior” the cadets were punished
for, but said it was not as bad as hazing and described it as “tomfoolery.”
But investigators uncovered several behaviors common to the team that served to embarrass or humiliate
younger members of the team. In some cases, gymnasts sustained injuries, including a severe abrasion,
broken ribs, at least one broken nose, a broken hand, and a concussion.
The documents provided also included a Report of Conduct for one cadet awarding him 50 demerits for
“participat[ing] in activities defined as hazing or fail[ing] to take action against those involved in hazing
activities,” which included atomic wedgies and situps and hitting freshmen with a plastic whiffle ball bat
dubbed a “recognition bat.” That cadet’s conduct constituted cruelty and maltreatment and conduct
unbecoming an officer under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the report said.
Another redacted letter of counseling included in the documents — it was unclear whether it was issued to
the same cadet who received the demerits or another one — blasted the cadet for the same offenses.
“This behavior is unbecoming of a United States Air Force officer candidate,” the cadet’s squadron
commander, an unidentified major, said in the LOC. “Further lack of judgment may result in more severe
corrective or punitive actions taken against you. Any further involvement in hazing or subordinate
mistreatment may result in consideration of your disenrollment from USAFA.”
'Unacceptable deviation'
In a statement provided to Air Force Times along with the FOIA, the academy said the 2013 misconduct
was “a severe, unacceptable deviation from our core principles. When the nature of the misconduct was
discovered, investigations were promptly initiated. Those found responsible were disciplined. Their
misconduct fundamentally conflicts with the values our nation holds dear — the values we serve to protect.
Whenever this kind of behavior is discovered in our ranks, in any form, we will take appropriate action to
hold perpetrators accountable.”
https://www.airforcetimes.com/articles/air-force-academy-gymnastics-hazing-investigation
An investigator noted that the team’s coaches gave the team’s seniors, or “firsties,” free rein to control the
culture and climate of the team, with apparently alarming consequences.
“Lord of the Flies: Firsties, without supervision, set the conditions for and/or actively participated in hazing
and physical maltreatment of the freshmen under the pretense that ‘boys will be boys,' ” an investigator
noted in a section labeled “Observations.” “The lack of understanding of what hazing is by team members
is disturbing.”
One coach disagreed with the upperclassmen’s view that they are solely in charge of managing the team’s
culture, and told investigators that “he is much more than just a coach ‘teaching flips.’”
Investigators found that in August 2013, upperclassmen had the new freshmen engage in a handstand
contest before unexpectedly wrestling them to the ground and giving them so-called “atomic wedgies” —
pulling their shorts or underwear up until they ripped, though they weren’t pulled all the way off. One
freshman suffered a severe rug burn on his shoulder the size of a racquetball while getting dragged around
the mat, the report said.
Building camaraderie
Gymnasts told investigators that giving unsuspecting freshmen atomic wedgies was a tradition going back
years to build team camaraderie, and that after the freshmen’s shorts or underwear ripped, the
upperclassmen embraced them and welcomed them to the team. One gymnast described it as “a fun event
intended to unify the team and their class,” and several said they didn’t feel it was done maliciously.
Another said he still kept his ripped underwear in his locker as a memento.
Another cadet told investigators that the atomic wedgies usually happened after coaches left halfway
through the team’s strength and conditioning practice. But while coaches didn’t see it happen, the cadet
said the team spoke about it openly in front of them afterward, so they must have known.
Cadets also said “atomic situps,” in which blindfolded freshmen were tricked into shoving their faces into
the exposed buttocks of upperclassmen, were a common prank on the team. Unsuspecting freshmen were
told to do situps with a towel over their face while another teammate held them down to provide more
resistance. While the freshmen did situps, other upperclassmen positioned themselves over them with their
pants pulled down. On cue, the other teammates would whip the towels away from the freshmen’s eyes at
the last second so they would drive their faces into the other cadets’ buttocks.
Gymnasts told investigators they often launched into spontaneous wrestling matches with one another,
which typically continued until someone tapped out or said they were done. But sometimes, team members
were not comfortable with this physical activity.
One freshman cadet on the team told investigators that over an eight-month period from late 2011 to early
2012, he was repeatedly called names, subjected to “constant verbal abuse,” and head butted by a team
captain, leaving him with a concussion that lasted two weeks.
“I immediately fell to the ground, and got really dizzy, and [my] vision was blurry,” the unnamed cadet told
investigators. “I got up, and did my best to try to laugh it off. I didn’t want [redacted] to see that it bothered
me or that I was weak. I gave [redacted] an awkward embrace and pat on the back because I wanted him to
see that I could handle it. I literally stumbled down to the training room but ensured [redacted] didn’t see
me.”
That cadet didn’t feel like he could talk to his coaches or the trainers about the problems he was having, so
he lied and told trainers that he sustained his concussion on the rings. He eventually told the trainers about
the head butt.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/articles/air-force-academy-gymnastics-hazing-investigation
The cadet became angry a few weeks later when he wasn’t included on the roster to compete in the 2012
NCAA tournament, and a coach told him he was dropped “because he hadn’t seen enough out of me from a
workout/competition standpoint.”
“I was livid, and extremely mad,” he said. “I then told him I wasn’t working out because his team captain
gave me a concussion. I remember it specifically, he just turned away and didn’t acknowledge that at all.”
Another unnamed freshman also told investigators that one day, a senior on the team mockingly asked him
if he was gay and the freshman replied, “Yeah man, aren’t you?” The freshman said the senior brought up
the exchange later at practice, punched the freshman “moderately hard” in the stomach so he doubled over,
tackled him, wrestled him and choked him in front of several other members of the team. The team captain
broke it up, but the senior later tackled, wrestled and choked the freshman again. When the freshman tried
to tap out, the senior stopped choking him, he said, but kept wrestling until another senior again broke it up
again.
A few minutes later, the senior attacked him for a third time, that freshman said, holding him down and
hitting him in the chest repeatedly. That senior was later removed from the team for a week because of that
incident, which other teammates confirmed to investigators.
That senior told investigators that “I wasn’t trying to hurt him” when he punched the freshman in the
stomach, and “I was still joking around” when he resumed wrestling him.
'A rougher culture than I expected'
That freshman said that a few days later, he bragged to the locker room about a 92 percent score he and his
roommate had just received on their Saturday AM inspection, or SAMI. A junior felt that violated an
unofficial rule against discussing military matters while practicing gymnastics, so he started punching the
freshman in the chest and upper arms 92 times, while another teammate held his arms back from behind.
The freshman said the punches were “enough to be aggravating but not nearly enough to leave bruises,”
and were followed by a 93rd punch to his thigh.
Another teammate described those punches as “not hard, barely touching him,” and said “it didn’t seem
unusual because they were both laughing.”
However, that freshman told investigators that he thought the upperclassmen’s behavior, while
inappropriate, wasn’t an abuse of their power.
“I just think they got carried away as testosterone-fueled boys,” he said. “I never felt it was ‘hazing’ and
never used those terms. I never felt in danger like I was going to break any bones, just didn’t feel like I was
part of the team.”
That freshman was the one who sustained the racquetball-sized burn on his left shoulder while receiving an
atomic wedgie. He said the incident was “roughhousing and playful,” but also said “I started to notice that
the team had a rougher culture than I expected.”
He also said the team “left the coaches in the dark” about some of the stuff that went on to keep their
teammates from getting into trouble.
“I’m just sick of always having to watch over my shoulder for the next punch or thing being thrown at me
and having to be silent around them because anything I say gets mocked,” he told his father in a text
message.
Another gymnast dislocated three ribs when a teammate tackled him on the academy’s terrazzo for making
fun of his home, and also pretended that his injury happened on the rings. He also said he broke his nose
https://www.airforcetimes.com/articles/air-force-academy-gymnastics-hazing-investigation
while wrestling with a teammate, and said “I break [it] frequently. I think I have broken it 14 times.”
However, it was unclear how many of those times were due to wrestling.
Yet another gymnast broke his hand punching a teammate in the back of the head. The cadet who was
punched admitted he “took a joke too far,” and said they were soon laughing about it. That punched cadet
was also the junior who punched the freshman 93 times for talking about his inspection score, though he
characterized them as “light punches in the stomach area.”
“I wasn’t singling [redacted] out, I would have done that to anybody on the team,” he said. “It was not
intended to be a violent thing; it was a reminder to focus on gymnastics while you’re in the gym.”
Another teammate told investigators that while he thought the atomic situps and recognition bats were
dumb or useless, he thought the wedgies were valuable exercises and that team’s culture didn’t amount to
hazing or abuse.
“It’s just pranks and messing around with people, no different than any other team I’ve been on in the
past,” that cadet said.
Racism
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/opinion/after-hate-crimes-victims-stuck-with-the-bill.html
After Hate Crimes, Victims Get Stuck With the Bill
[OPINION]
By Anna North
The New York Times, April 26, 2017
Kanwal Khurana across the street from his home in
Cleveland. (Credit: Andrew Spear for The New York Times)
Kanwal Khurana loved living in Cleveland. He and his wife had
moved from the suburbs to an apartment in the city in December.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “You can see the whole downtown.”
But less than two months later, Mr. Khurana and his wife had just
parked their car across the street from the building when they heard
someone say, “go back to your own country.” The next morning, they discovered that someone had slashed
all four of their tires.
Mr. Khurana, 63, is retired from his job writing contracts for Cuyahoga County, and his wife is a
homemaker. They help their son pay his tuition at Kent State. They have car insurance, but still had to
come up with a $500 co-payment to have their car towed and repaired, plus the fee to rent a car in the
meantime.
The Khuranas reached out to city and state officials for help paying their bills. They discovered, as many
victims of hate and harassment do, that getting financial assistance isn’t always easy.
Victims of hate crimes can sue perpetrators under state and federal hate crime or other civil rights laws for
compensatory damages and, in some cases, punitive damages as well. But first they need lawyers.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law recently began operating a hotline at 844-9-NOHATE (844-966-4283), through which volunteers can help callers find legal representation. But beyond
that, “there is no real comprehensive network around the country” to connect victims of hate crimes or
harassment with lawyers, said Betsy Shuman-Moore, the director of the Hate Crime Project at the Chicago
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. In the Chicago area, she added, legal resources for hate crime
victims have actually decreased in recent years.
When the perpetrator remains unidentified, as in the Khuranas’ case, a lawsuit is usually not an option.
Some states, however, have funds set aside to help crime victims pay their expenses. Mr. Khurana wrote to
the mayor of Cleveland, whose staff suggested he contact the Ohio attorney general’s office. The office
maintains a victims’ compensation fund, but Mr. Khurana was told he was not eligible for compensation
because he had not been physically injured. The office sent him a booklet titled “Picking Up the Pieces”
with information about crime victims’ rights.
Sometimes, friends or family — or strangers — step in to help hate crime victims. After Cristina AlfonsoZea was attacked last year in the parking lot outside her home in Las Vegas by assailants who hit her in the
head, stole her wallet and phone and wrote slurs on her car, her friend set up a GoFundMe campaign to
help her.
Ms. Alfonso-Zea, a veteran, already had post-traumatic stress disorder, which was exacerbated by the
attack. The money from the campaign helped her fix her car and move away from the area where she was
attacked. The campaign also helped her psychologically, she said: “It made me realize that there’s really
good people out there that really care about you, even if they don’t know you.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/opinion/after-hate-crimes-victims-stuck-with-the-bill.html
She wishes hate crime victims got more information on compensation funds and other resources. “In Las
Vegas, they teach us about flash flooding, they teach us abandonment of a rabbit is a felony,” she said, “but
at the same time they don’t really teach us about having funds like that or having a safe place that you can
go to.”
Mrs. Khurana ultimately sold some of her jewelry to pay for their car expenses. The Khuranas don’t plan to
move, but they are more careful when they go out in their neighborhood now, and they park their car in a
different spot that costs $5 a day.
Mr. Khurana is grateful he and his wife weren’t hurt — he thinks of the shooting of two Indian immigrants,
Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, in Kansas in February.
“That night anything could have happened,” he said. “We still feel lucky.”
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/us/antisemitic-incidents-reports-trnd/index.html
Anti-Semitic incidents rose a whopping 86% in the first 3
months of 2017
By Doug Criss and Carma Hassan
CNN, April 24, 2017
In the first three months
of this year, the number
of anti-Semitic incidents
in the US was 86%
higher than the same
period last year, says a
new report.
The report, released
Monday by AntiDefamation League,
counted 541 anti-Semitic
attacks and
threats between January
and March.
There were 281
incidents in the same
time period in 2016.
Overall, the picture was
pretty grim last year too.
The ADL says antiSemitic were up by more
than a third last year, compared with 2015. And the numbers skyrocketed since November. There were 34
cases that were linked directly to last year's presidential election.
"There's been a significant, sustained increase in anti-Semitic activity since the start of 2016 and what's
most concerning is the fact that the numbers have accelerated over the past five months," said Jonathan A.
Greenblatt, the ADL's CEO.
"Clearly, we have work to do and need to bring more urgency to the fight. At ADL, we will use every
resource available to put a stop to anti-Semitism. But we also need more leaders to speak out against this
cancer of hate and more action at all levels to counter anti-Semitism."
The incidents
There were 541 incidents in the first three months of 2017, including:

380 cases of harassment, including 161 bomb threats

155 cases of vandalism, including three incidents where cemeteries were desecrated

6 cases of physical assault
There were 1,266 incidents in all of 2016, including:

720 cases of harassment and threats
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/us/antisemitic-incidents-reports-trnd/index.html
 510 cases of vandalism

36 cases of physical assault
The states
The states which had the highest
number of incidents in 2016 and
the first quarter of 2017 were:

California (211 in 2016;
87 in first quarter 2017)

New York (199; 97)

New Jersey (157; 24)

Florida (137; 41)

Massachusetts (125; 38)
These states also have some of
the largest Jewish populations in
the nation.
The instances
The report gives details on a
number of recent cases of
harassment, vandalism and
assault against Jews in the US, including:

A rabbi in New York last month received a threatening email which read in part, "Things will start
getting bloodier for the Jew boys, I know where you live."

In November 2016 in Colrain, Massachusetts, an elementary school student who was reading a
book about World War II performed the Nazi salute and told a Jewish student that she believes Jews
are an inferior species.

A student passed a Jewish classmate a note in Marietta, Georgia, in November 2016 containing a
swastika and the phrase, "Hitler did the world a favor."

In December 2016, in an area at New York's City College where Jews gather for afternoon prayer
services, someone left graffiti reading "Jews are pest! [sic] Hitler was right to kill them all."

In January 2017 three synagogues in Clearwater, Florida, had swastikas drawn on their
sidewalks and/or buildings on the same day.

A man was parked in his vehicle in Jersey City, New Jersey, in December 2016 when a person
approached, pointed a handgun, and fired two shots at his vehicle. A witness later heard the shooter
refer to his victim as a "Jew bastard."
The schools
Anti-Semitic incidents at non-Jewish schools rose sharply as well, according to the report.

In 2016 there were 235 such cases at elementary, middle and high schools, a jump of 106%.

The increase continued into the first quarter of this year, with 95 cases reported.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/us/antisemitic-incidents-reports-trnd/index.html
This is especially concerning
to ADL officials.
"Schools are a microcosm of
the country," said Greenblatt.
"Children absorb messages
from their parents and the
media, and bring them into
their schools and playgrounds.
We are very concerned the
next generation is
internalizing messages of
intolerance and bigotry."
Around the world
While cases of violence and
harassment against Jews ticked up significantly in the US, they were down worldwide, according to
a report by the Kantor Center. Cases of violence against Jews worldwide dipped 12% last year, from 410
incidents in 2015 to 361 in 2016, the report says.
But a top official at the Kantor Center, which compiles a database of anti-Semitic incidents, says that's no
reason for anyone to relax.
"2016 was a dramatic year for many around the world and for Jews it was a year of contradictions," said
Moshe Kantor, a businessman and philanthropist who the center is named for.
"While the number of anti-Semitic incidents has decreased worldwide in 2016, the enemies of Jewish
people have found new avenues to express their anti-Semitism with significant increase of hate online and
against less protected targets like cemeteries," added Kantor, who is president of the European Jewish
Congress. "This means, in fact, the motivation has not declined and the sense of security felt by many
Jewish communities remains fragile."
The Kantor Center primarily attributes the drop to improved security measures (including intelligence
agencies increasing the surveillance of extremist groups) and the arrival of waves of mostly-Muslim
refugees from the Middle East and North Africa into Europe taking the extreme right's attention away from
Jewish communities.
https://www.apnews.com/e2afc1f50c8342e3be988c9039d619ab/APNewsBreak:-Little-change-on-race-inBoston-police-stops
Boston police make little progress on race gap
By Philip Marcelo
The Associated Press, April 27, 2017
BOSTON (AP) — The rate at which minorities are subjected to stops, searches and frisks by police doesn't
appear to be improving in Boston in the year since the department claimed it was narrowing racial
disparities in its tactics.
At least 71 percent of all street level, police-civilian encounters from 2015 through early 2016 involved
persons of color, while whites comprised about 22 percent, an Associated Press review of the most recently
available data shows.
That's only a slight decline from the 73 percent that minorities comprised in such street-level encounters
between 2011 and early 2015, according to data the city made available last year.
It's also higher than the roughly 63 percent that blacks comprised between 2007 and 2010, according to
a report the department released in 2015. That report didn't include the tallies for other minority groups.
And the gap between minorities and whites in the most recent reporting period is likely higher.
Over 7 percent of all police-civilian encounters compiled in the department's 2015 to 2016 "Field
Interrogation, Observation, Frisk and/or Search" reports don't list the civilian's race at all.
Civil rights activists have complained for years that blacks, in particular, comprise a majority of these kinds
of police interactions in Boston, despite accounting for about 25 percent of the population.
The disparity matters because it affects how some residents in largely minority communities perceive
police, said Carl Williams, of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which
provided the recent police data the AP analyzed.
"People feel uncomfortable talking with police when they feel they're getting stopped unjustly," he said.
Police Commissioner William Evans said Wednesday that the numbers, when put into context by
researchers working this past year to analyze them, will show officers are focusing on the people and places
where violence happening.
"The numbers are what they are," he said. "We've got one of the safest cities in America, and it's because of
the job we do. If we weren't focusing on these people in these neighborhoods, then people would be saying
we weren't doing our job."
Mayor Marty Walsh said arrests have gone down roughly 40 percent in the past three years, partly because
police are identifying at-risk youths in street encounters and intervening before they can commit more
serious crimes.
"We've been successful with that, and we're going to continue to do that," he said.
Police spokesman Michael McCarthy earlier dismissed the AP review as "not appropriate and quite frankly
irresponsible" because it didn't account for variables not provided in the data, such as neighborhood crime
statistics and a subject's prior arrests and gang affiliations.
"Anything short of that is a complete disservice," he said in an email.
Big-city police departments vary in how they collect data on such encounters and how public they make it.
https://www.apnews.com/e2afc1f50c8342e3be988c9039d619ab/APNewsBreak:-Little-change-on-race-inBoston-police-stops
New York City police, prompted by a lawsuit, have been releasing quarterly reports for years, something
the Massachusetts ACLU chapter has also sued Boston to provide.
New York's data show at least 83 percent of stops through the first three quarters of 2016 involved blacks
or other minorities. From 2011 to 2014, they averaged roughly 84 percent of stops.
Philadelphia police provide regular data as part of a court order. The most recent report, which covers the
first half of 2015, shows minorities accounted for 77 percent of stops during that period.
The Boston police enlisted independent researchers to conduct a deeper study of the 2011 to 2015 data last
year, but that won't be complete at least until this summer because researchers want more information from
police, said Anthony Braga, head of Northeastern University's criminal justice school and a researcher on
that study.
He echoed the department's sentiment that analysis of the raw data before his study is complete is "overly
simplistic, woefully incomplete, and, quite frankly, irresponsible."
But Shea Cronin, a criminal justice professor at Boston University not affiliated with the police data study,
says looking at the citywide rates can be a valid starting point, even if it has its limitations.
He suggested the department should incorporate reviews of these and other statistics in their management
evaluations to see whether specific officers, units or shifts use such tactics most often.
In an improvement on past data, the latest numbers from Boston Police provide more detail about the
reasons for the police-civilian encounters and some of the actions police took as a result.
In about 21 percent of the incidents from 2015 to early 2016, for example, officers cited "reasonable
suspicion" as the reason they engaged suspects. In 31 percent of the time, officer's cited "probable cause."
Generally, police need at least "reasonable suspicion" a crime has been, is being or will be committed in
order to stop, briefly detain or frisk an individual. "Probable cause" is a higher legal threshold needed to
arrest someone.
Of the more than 17,300 total incidents, officers frisked civilians about 21 percent of the time, searched
them or their vehicles over 16 percent of the time, and issued a summons 2 percent of the time.
The data covering 2011 to early 2015, in contrast, provided little to no detail about why officers engaged
with civilians, why a person was subsequently subjected to a search or frisk, and what the outcome of the
encounters was, a previous AP review found.
The new data, however, still lack details about what, if anything, came of the stops in terms of arrests or
seizures. Civil rights groups have said such information is critical to gauging whether the methods are
effective.
"The question remains: Are there aggressive tactics being used?" said Darnell Williams, of the Urban
League of Eastern Massachusetts. "We're not here to second-guess what police are doing, but if there is a
disproportionate amount of blacks being stopped for non-obvious reasons, then that's a concern."
Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo. His work can be found
at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/philip-marcelo .
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/04/26/florida-principal-instructed-teachers-togroup-white-students-together-at-majority-black-school/
Florida principal instructed teachers to group white
students together at majority-black school
By Lindsey Bever
The Washington Post, April 26, 2017
Christine Hoffman (Pinellas County Schools)
An elementary school principal at a predominantly black school in western Florida
has requested to be reassigned amid tension over a letter she sent
instructing teachers to group white students in the same classroom.
Christine Hoffman, former principal at Campbell Park Elementary in St.
Petersburg, Fla., asked to be “relieved” as principal and was transferred Tuesday to
the Pinellas County school district headquarters during an internal investigation,
the district said in a statement.
Hoffman had come under fire for an email she sent to teachers April 18 about class rosters, in which she
stated that teachers should keep an equal number of boys and girls in each class and “white students should
be in the same class.” In a follow-up email to staff members two days later, the principal apologized for her
“poor judgment.”
“I made a mistake, and I am sorry,” Hoffman wrote.
She then sent a similar letter to the students’ parents.
“As a white woman leading a predominately black school, I am approaching this as an opportunity to
learn,” Hoffman wrote in the letter. “Although I have participated in training on diversity and implicit bias,
this recent incident makes it clear that I need to seek additional opportunities to apply racial sensitivity and
cultural competence in my work. I want all of my actions and decisions as principal to only strengthen and
unite our school as we meet the needs of our students.”
She added that she was requesting that teachers ensure that there were not only one white student in a
classroom.
“I was not asking that all white students in each grade be clustered, as that is not our practice in creating
class lists,” Hoffman wrote. “I understand how racially insensitive the guideline was.”
The controversial memo prompted an uproar — parents and outraged citizens called on the local NAACP
chapter and a few people protested outside the school, according to local news reports.
“She needs to understand that segregation should not exist in our schools,” Velma Newmon, whose
grandchildren will eventually go to Campbell Park Elementary, told Fox 13 News. “She needs to
understand that all races should learn equally and it’s sad that they’re only reassigning her. You’re just
going to put a Band-Aid on the problem.”
Campbell Park Elementary had 564 students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade during the 2014-15
school year; 451 were black and 77 were white, according to data from the National Center for Education
Statistics. Current enrollment figures show 606 students.
In a meeting with parents Monday, Hoffman was reportedly asked why she wanted white students in the
same classroom. Hoffman told them she wanted the students to be comfortable, parents told the Tampa Bay
Times.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/04/26/florida-principal-instructed-teachers-togroup-white-students-together-at-majority-black-school/
Denise Ford, a 53-year-old community member, told the newspaper that parents then asked Hoffman
whether the white students had reported feeling uncomfortable in class — and she said no.
“The parents said that as black people we are used to being the only black person in the classroom and no
one is making sure we are comfortable,” Ford told the newspaper. “The parents were not accepting of any
excuse. We accept your apology, but you have to go.”
Pinellas County Schools spokeswoman Lisa Wolf told the Tampa Bay Times that Hoffman will not return
to Campbell Park Elementary. However, it is not clear whether Hoffman will be assigned to another
school; Wolf told the newspaper that the district is waiting to make further decisions until it completes the
investigation into the matter.
The school district said Hoffman sent a recorded phone message to parents Monday, informing them of her
departure.
“Due to recent events, my presence has created a distraction,” she said in the recording, according to the
district. “As a result, I’ve requested to transfer and allow another person to lead this school. This was a very
difficult decision for me. The Campbell Park community has become part of my family and I want all of
our students to be successful.”
Maria Scruggs, president of the St. Petersburg chapter of the NAACP, told Fox 13 News that the situation
is reminiscent of “the Jim Crow days.”
“This is systemic because she didn’t think twice about putting it in writing,” Scruggs, who met with the
Pinellas County Schools superintendent, told the news station. “She didn’t think twice about disseminating
it.”
Sexual Assault /
Harassment
https://www.stripes.com/news/jury-rejects-prosecution-s-sex-assault-case-against-sergeant-1.465612
Jury rejects prosecution’s sex assault case against sergeant
By Nancy Montgomery
Stars and Stripes, April 27, 2017
VICENZA, Italy — An Army sergeant accused of stealing into a sleeping soldier’s room to sexually assault
him was acquitted Wednesday after a three-day court-martial.
Sgt. Darien Shedrick was acquitted of abusive sexual contact, attempt to commit forcible sodomy and
housebreaking. He was convicted of making a false official statement in an interview with criminal
investigators. The military jury on Thursday sentenced him to 60 days’ restriction and hard labor.
Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of a year in prison and a dishonorable discharge.
The case, according to victim advocates, represented a step forward in sexual assault reporting because
male victims are far less likely than female victims to disclose being sexually assaulted or to seek services,
according to a RAND Corp. study and Pentagon reports. But Michael Waddington, Shedrick’s lead defense
lawyer, said the case was pursued as “a homosexual witch hunt.”
The case was initiated last May after the then-18-year-old private first class reported that he’d been
awakened in his bed in his barracks room by Shedrick tugging at his shorts, then saw that his pants had
been unzipped and his belt buckle undone. “He was angry that the accused had come into his room and
tried to pull off his shorts,” the prosecutor, Capt. Andrew Warmington, told the nine-person jury in closing
arguments. “He realized that he needed to have the courage to come forward ... so that another soldier
wouldn’t wake up with the accused at the foot of his bed trying to take off his shorts.”
Shedrick, 35, had gained entrance to the room by telling the barracks charge of quarters that he wanted to
check on the private first class. In a videotaped interview with criminal investigators shown at trial he
initially denied going into the room, then said he had been but had not touched the soldier.
After an investigator told him that his DNA from skin cells could show up on the private first class’
clothes, Shedrick said he might have accidentally touched the alleged victim earlier in the evening as the
two socialized in Shedrick’s room. The private first class had dropped a bottle of beer, Shedrick said, and
he moved him out of the way to clean it up.
Shedrick told the interviewer that he was bisexual and that he and the private first class had been flirting.
But he said he’d decided against pursuing sex when the private first class dropped the beer.
As it turned out, the only usable DNA found on the private first class' clothes belonged to the private first
class and another, unidentified person who was not Shedrick.
Shedrick’s smartphone, which the private first class had said Shedrick used to show him pornography, had
no porn on it but, as the prosecutor pointed out, it lacked any browsing history whatsoever.
In his closing argument, Waddington said that authorities’ “confirmation bias” had led them to pursue a
case he said was riddled with reasonable doubt. “If there’s no porn on the phone, they’re going to go to the
grave saying there was porn on the phone,” he said.
He mocked a prosecution exhibit as “something a kindergartner would draw.”
The prosecutor told the jury that the case boiled down to two questions: “Why was the accused in (the
private first class') room and why was the accused so afraid to tell (criminal investigators) he was in there?”
But Waddington said that prosecutors had not proved their case. “You can’t guess a man into prison,” he
said.
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/articles/marine-charged-with-posting-intimate-pictures-of-woman
Marine faces felony charge for allegedly posting intimate
pictures of woman online
By Jeff Schogol
Marine Corps Times, April 26, 2017
(Photo Credit: Jacksonville Police Department, N.C.)
A Marine with more than 20 years of service has been charged in a civilian court
with posting intimate pictures of a woman online, officials said.
“We are aware of the alleged charges against Master Sgt. Theophilus Thomas, and
are working with NCIS and local authorities to ensure a thorough investigation,”
said Capt. John Roberts, a spokesman for the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing.
Thomas, 38, is an avionics chief, currently assigned to Marine Light Attack
Helicopter Squadron 167 at Marine Corps Air Station New River in Jacksonville, N.C. News of Thomas'
arrest was first reported by the Jacksonville Daily News.
He is accused of posting one nude photo of the woman and six pictures of her wearing underwear on April
14, according to an arrest warrant, which does not identify the website where the pictures appeared.
Jacksonville police arrested Thomas on April 20 after the woman told authorities about the pictures, said
police spokeswoman Beth Purcell. The woman had previously been in a relationship with him.
Thomas has been charged with felony disclosure of private images, and his preliminary hearing is slated for
May 11, officials said. He is currently free on $20,000 of unsecured bail.
The avionics chief joined the Marine Corps in July 1996 and became a master sergeant in June, according
to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. His awards include two Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medals,
one Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, six good conduct ribbons and five sea service
deployment ribbons.
The case is separate from the ongoing Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation of service
members and veterans who allegedly posted nude pictures of women, and later harassed them, on the
Marines United Facebook group.
Investigators have identified 14 active-duty Marines and one active-duty sailor who may have been
involved in “some type of criminal activity” by posting nude pictures, NCIS Director Andrew Traver told
reporters on April 7.
No charges have been filed so far in connection with the investigation, NCIS spokesman Ed Buice said on
Wednesday.
In the wake of the Marines United scandal, acting Navy Secretary Sean Stackley has made it possible for
sailors and Marines to be charged under military law for sharing intimate pictures of service members
without their consent. Violators can be charged with failing to obey an order or regulation under Article 92
of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-survey-on-sexual-assault-alarmed-colleges-heres-how-topschools-responded/2017/04/25/1c6dd3f0-29e0-11e7-a616-d7c8a68c1a66_story.html
A survey on sexual assault alarmed colleges. Here’s how top
schools responded.
By Susan Svrluga and Sarah Larimer
The Washington Post, April 26, 2017
Passersby write messages to sexual assault victims during an event
held at UCLA in 2015 to pay respect to students who have
experienced sexual violence (Evelyn Hockstein/For The
Washington Post)
Startled by data suggesting that sexual assault is common and
underreported on campuses across the country, university leaders
have increased staffing, training and support for students in recent
years, according to a new survey of leading universities.
Schools have increased spending and hiring to combat sexual assault on campus, the survey found, adding
an average of five new full-time employees in the past few years. At the University of Virginia, those
efforts have cost $1.6 million since 2014.
That’s just one sign of what the Association of American Universities says is a sweeping response by top
schools to respond to the issue.
The AAU report, released Wednesday, comes in the early months of the Trump administration, as some
have wondered how the new president and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will handle campus sexual
assault.
Two years ago, a landmark AAU survey found that more than 20 percent of female undergraduates had
suffered sexual assault or misconduct, a report that many university leaders called alarming and a call to
action. Some 150,000 students at 27 schools, including most of the Ivy League, had responded to the
survey, providing extensive data on the scope of a problem that activists had been demanding be confronted
head-on.
That data compounded the sense of urgency that scrutiny from the Obama administration and student
activists had brought to the issue. Under Obama, the Education Department conducted hundreds of
investigations of colleges for their handling of sexual violence complaints. And universities responded,
with everything from town-hall meetings to new classes to skits for incoming freshmen to complete
overhauls of their policies around the issue.
It was a big wake-up call, said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the AAU. “We understood the problem in a
way we didn’t before,” she told The Post Tuesday. The AAU is a group of 62 prominent research
universities in the United States and Canada.
The new report details the scope of that response, with a panoply of efforts aimed at improving education,
prevention, investigations and support for students affected. All of the 55 universities surveyed added
training, and efforts to better support victims of sexual misconduct. The vast majority worked to improve
and streamline the way complaints are handled, sharing information confidentially across departments.
“There is no magic bullet,” the report concludes, “or one-size-fits-all approach: universities have
undertaken a wide variety of actions including increased and targeted training, greater awareness-building,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-survey-on-sexual-assault-alarmed-colleges-heres-how-topschools-responded/2017/04/25/1c6dd3f0-29e0-11e7-a616-d7c8a68c1a66_story.html
better coordinated data collection, ... and greater levels of collaboration within institutions and their
communities.”
One of the biggest changes, several university presidents said Tuesday, was the response from students: At
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Chancellor Rebecca Blank said more than 200 students in the Greek
community voluntarily convened around the issue, crafting a set of bylaws for their own organizations to
require training and oversight, and designating people to look for ways to minimize risk.
“If anything will make a difference, it’s not what I or other people around this table say about this,” Blank
said. “It’s what students say to each other.”
David Leebron, president of Rice University, noted that students had helped design a mandatory course on
the issue.
“There has been a transition from the question of ‘What are you going to do about this?’ to ‘What can we
do about it?’” Leebron said.
One “critical area” that the AAU report indicates universities are dedicating more attention to is bystander
intervention training, or making sure students, staff and others in the academic community know how to
step in when situations seem troubling.
Carol Folt, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, compared bystander intervention
training to the impact the idea of “designated drivers” had on the way people planned for parties. Students
who might have looked the other way in the past now see it as admirable to intervene if needed. “That is a
very large cultural shift we’re seeing,” Folt said.
● Since 2013, all of the schools that responded had surveyed their students on sexual assault and
misconduct issues at least one time.
● In the past three academic years, all the schools that responded had changed or are working to
change their “education and training,” aimed at the student body and faculty members.
● Folt and others said adjudication of sexual assault allegations remained a challenge for
institutions — and one with no easy answers. Campuses must deal with privacy concerns and
consider disclosure, they explained, and try to find a balance.
Several university presidents said they think the change will be lasting: “This has been institutionalized as
an issue on campus,” Leebron said.