THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

United Nations investigators said on Thursday that Israeli troops may have committed crimes against humanity in shooting unarmed civilians — including children — who posed no threat during the mass protests last year at the border with Gaza.

A commission of inquiry, formed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to look into the violence, reported that Israeli security forces had killed 189 Palestinians and injured more than 9,000 others. Its 25-page report, released in Geneva on Thursday, accused the Israeli authorities of showing little willingness to prosecute anyone responsible.

“The Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot, nor were they directly participating in hostilities,” the panel wrote. “Less lethal alternatives remained available and substantial defenses were in place, rendering the use of lethal force neither necessary nor proportionate, and therefore impermissible.”

The Gaza demonstrations drew tens of thousands of people on Fridays, beginning on March 30 last year, to spots along the fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip.

Palestinians sought an end to the economic blockade that has been choking off Gaza for more than a decade. They also wanted refugees and their descendants to be allowed to reclaim property in Israel, 70 years after thousands of Palestinians were displaced.

From the outset, Israel objected to the United Nations inquiry, calling it an example of the Human Rights Council’s bias, and refused to allow the three-person panel to visit Israel or Gaza. Egypt initially agreed to let the investigators into Gaza, but later declined on grounds of security.

Without access to the area, the commission drew on 325 interviews and more than 8,000 documents, including affidavits and medical reports, as well as photographs and video and drone footage. Along with its report, it released a video compilation showing some of the shootings.

It concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers had deliberately shot at journalists, health workers, children and people with disabilities.

Of the 189 Palestinians killed, investigators said, 183 were shot with live ammunition, including 35 children, three health workers and two journalists.

It reported 6,106 people wounded by live ammunition, including 940 children, 39 health workers and 39 journalists. In addition, 3,098 people were injured by bullet fragments or other shrapnel, or were struck directly by tear gas canisters or rubber bullets.

// posted by montag @ 1:52 PM 0 Comments

Pakistan said Wednesday that it downed two Indian fighter jets and captured a pilot, escalating hostilities between the nuclear-armed neighbors a day after Indian warplanes struck inside Pakistani territory for the first time in five decades.

The rapid turn of events raised fears that the historical animosities between India and Pakistan could be steering them toward another war.

Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan urged India to settle matters through talks, referring to the nuclear weapons both countries hold and the risk of further escalation.

“All big wars have been due to miscalculation. No one knew how the war would end,” he said in a televised speech. “My question to India is that given the weapons we have, can we afford miscalculation?”

Tensions have been rising since a suicide bombing two weeks ago that hit an Indian paramilitary convoy in Kashmir, the disputed territory that has been a chronic flash point. Expectations that diplomacy and calls for calm would de-escalate the crisis have yet to show any obvious result.

In New Delhi, officials confirmed that an Indian Air Force pilot was in Pakistani custody, complicating an already tough landscape for Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of hotly contested elections this spring...In India, panic intensified around Kashmir. Hundreds of residents fled their homes, while volunteers painted large red crosses on the roofs of hospitals, to protect them in case of airstrikes.

In Pakistan, dozens of tanks were deployed to the border in broad daylight, underscoring the heightened state of alert as both sides scrambled to shore up their military positions. Such equipment usually is moved under the cloak of night.

India’s government confirmed that one of its MiG-21 fighter jets had been “lost” as it thwarted what the government said was an attempt by Pakistan’s air force to strike an unspecified target inside India. A Pakistani aircraft was shot down by an Indian fighter jet, New Delhi said, a claim that Pakistan denied.

Raveesh Kumar, the chief spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, told a news conference in New Delhi that the government was still “ascertaining the facts” behind Pakistan’s claims of having downed two aircraft, and declined to take questions.

Although both India and Pakistan say they want to resolve the current crisis diplomatically, the two governments may be beholden to their electorates, amid calls for firm military responses from both sides of the border. In Pakistan, the current crisis has shored up support for Mr. Khan, who took office six months ago and has since faced growing opposition domestically.

The crisis has not presented such an opportunity for Mr. Modi, who seemed destined just a year ago to clinch a second term as India’s prime minister. Since then, Mr. Modi has faced considerable opposition over what critics say is his mishandling of the economy ahead of the elections this spring. The capture of the Indian pilot may only weaken his position and lead to a dangerous escalation if Mr. Modi chooses to respond militarily.

“Where the danger comes in is if India does not calculate strategically but starts calculating only from the perspective of electoral benefits,” said Ajai Shukla, a retired Indian Army colonel and a defense analyst. “This is a game of uncertain outcomes, and escalation is a very dicey game.”

// posted by montag @ 1:23 PM 0 Comments

Seven pharmaceutical executives faced a day of reckoning on Tuesday as they were challenged to justify high drug prices at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee.

The hearing will be political theater, but could also be a first step toward legislation to provide some relief to consumers, as lawmakers of both parties and President Trump have vowed to slow the relentless rise of drug prices.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Finance Committee, set the tone for the hearing with a prepared opening statement in which he said that practices of the pharmaceutical industry “thwart the laws and regulations designed to promote competition” and the use of lower-cost generic drugs.

“We’ve all seen the finger-pointing,” Mr. Grassley said. “Every link in the supply chain has gotten skilled at that. But, like most Americans, I’m sick and tired of the blame game. It’s time for solutions.”

Mr. Grassley said he was determined to restore a proper balance between encouraging the development of innovative drugs and keeping prices affordable for consumers and taxpayers.

Several themes ran through the prepared testimony of drug company executives, who were clearly playing defense.

The main problem, they said, is not the high list prices set by drug manufacturers, but the high out-of-pocket costs paid by patients. The drug makers all said they wanted to be part of the solution because they wanted to be sure patients had access to their drugs.

Several drug company executives suggested establishing a monthly or annual limit on a Medicare patient’s out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs. Costs above any limits would be paid by insurers, such as private health plans or Medicare.

At least two chief executives — Kenneth C. Frazier of Merck and Olivier Brandicourt of Sanofi — said they could support legislation that speeds the development of generic medications by requiring brand-name manufacturers to provide samples to generic drug companies.

Generic drug developers need samples of brand-name drugs to show that a generic copy is equivalent to the original, but they have often had difficulty getting them.

Ronny Gal, a securities analyst who follows the drug industry for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said he doubted that drug companies would change their pricing practices because of the hearing.

“This is a $460 billion industry,” Mr. Gal said. “You think three hours of an orchestrated show before Congress will lead to different behavior? I don’t think so.”

// posted by montag @ 1:28 PM 0 Comments

President Trump on Monday cautioned fellow Republicans against falling into a Democratic “trap” as lawmakers prepare to vote this week on legislation rejecting his declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

A measure is expected to pass easily in the Democratic-controlled House on Tuesday, forcing a difficult vote for GOP senators, who will have to weigh whether to support Trump on a move that even some in his party have criticized as circumventing the will of Congress.

“I hope our great Republican Senators don’t get led down the path of weak and ineffective Border Security,” Trump said in a tweet Monday. “Without strong Borders, we don’t have a Country - and the voters are on board with us. Be strong and smart, don’t fall into the Democrats ‘trap’ of Open Borders and Crime!”

Trump is attempting to use the emergency declaration to justify spending significantly more on barriers at the border than what Congress authorized in a compromise intended to avert another partial government shutdown.

On Friday, Trump said he would veto the measure “100 percent” if that happened. And he predicted that Congress would be unable to muster the votes to override his veto.

A group of 23 former Republican members of Congress has written a letter urging a termination of the emergency declaration.

The letter argues that Trump is encroaching on Congress’s “power of the purse” and urges current lawmakers to stand up for its constitutional powers.

We who have served where you serve now call on you to honor your oath of office and to protect the Constitution and the responsibilities it vested in Congress,” says the letter.

// posted by montag @ 1:58 PM 0 Comments

Pope Francis ended a landmark Vatican meeting on clerical sexual abuse with an appeal “for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors,” which he compared to human sacrifice, but his speech did not offer concrete policy remedies demanded by many of the faithful.

In the speech at the end of a Mass in the Apostolic Palace’s frescoed Sala Reggia hall, Francis argued that “even a single case of abuse” in the Roman Catholic Church — which he said was the work of the devil — must be met “with the utmost seriousness.” He said that eradicating the scourge required more than legal processes and “disciplinary measures.”

“To combat this evil that strikes at the very heart of our mission,” the pope said, the church needed to protect children “from ravenous wolves.”

Faithful Catholics — especially those in the United States and other countries that have grappled with the problem for years — had demanded more than homilies: They wanted action that would hold their leaders accountable, once and for all.

They did not get it from the pope’s speech.

But church officials have hinted that concrete policy changes were on the horizon, especially on issues of transparency and bishop accountability that were discussed during the meeting.

Pope Francis had sought to get the church’s leaders on the same page for the first time, summoning them to the meeting in September, decades after the sexual abuse crisis first exploded in the United States. He sent a message to his bishops and the faithful that he, too, wanted concrete remedies to come out of the meeting.

After the pope’s speech on Sunday, the Vatican announced several forthcoming measures, including one that church officials described as toughening up child protection laws in the Vatican City-State itself.

Another was what the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, called a “very brief” handbook for bishops to “understand their duties and tasks” on cases of sexual abuse and the introduction of a new task force of experts and canon lawyers to assist bishops in countries with less experience and resources to handle the issue.

But when asked about the measures on Sunday, the Vatican acknowledged that all had already been in the pipeline well before the meeting began on Thursday, and Father Lombardi said that none included any input from the four-day meeting.

Instead, Vatican officials focused on the spiritual evolution of bishops and the importance of getting them all on the same page in tackling sexual abuse.

“At the end of the day, it is the change of heart that is important,” Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s leading sex-crimes investigator, said Sunday afternoon. The Rev. Hans Zollner, another leader in the church’s efforts to safeguard children, added that the church had made a “leap” forward in getting at the “systemic roots” of the scandal. But he said it would take more time and energy to “turn a big ship around.”

// posted by montag @ 1:13 PM 0 Comments

Even before Democrats finish drafting bills to create a single-payer health care system, the health care and insurance industries have assembled a small army of lobbyists to kill “Medicare for all,” an idea that is mocked publicly but is being greeted privately with increasing seriousness.

Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers are intent on strangling Medicare for all before it advances from an aspirational slogan to a legislative agenda item. They have hired a top lieutenant in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to spearhead the effort. And their tactics will show Democrats what they are up against as the party drifts to the left on health care.

They also demonstrate how entrenched the Democrats’ last big health care victory, the Affordable Care Act, has become in the nation’s health care system.

The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.

“We have a structure that frankly works for most Americans,” said Charles N. Kahn III, the president of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents investor-owned hospitals. “Let’s make it work for all Americans. We reject the notion that we need to turn the whole apple cart over and start all over again.”

The Democrats’ proposals could radically change the way health care providers do business and could drastically shrink the role and the revenues of insurers, depending on how a single-payer system is devised.

The hospital federation and two powerful lobbies, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, created a coalition last June to pre-empt what they saw as an alarming groundswell of interest in proposals to expand the federal role in health care.

In a daily fusillade of digital advertising, videos and Twitter posts, the coalition, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, says that Medicare for all will require tax increases and give politicians and bureaucrats control of medical decisions now made by doctors and patients — arguments that echo those made to stop Medicare in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton’s health plan in 1993 and the Affordable Care Act a decade ago.

The coalition will step up the tempo in the coming week as Democrats in the House and the Senate plan to introduce bills to establish a single-payer system.

The name of the coalition is intentionally nondescript, and its executive director, Lauren Crawford Shaver, who led Mrs. Clinton’s efforts in 2016 to put marginal states into play, is cagey when asked for details. She says only that the group is planning “a big nationwide effort” with grass-roots allies.

But its reach is undeniable. The coalition has picked up more than 25 members, including the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association and the nation’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.

And it has already sprung into action.

// posted by montag @ 1:33 PM 0 Comments

Contradicting his father’s previous denials, the son of Republican Mark Harris testified Wednesday that he told the candidate multiple times that he had concerns about the political operative hired to run an absentee ballot campaign in Bladen County.

The testimony from John Harris rebutted suggestions by Harris and his campaign that they’d seen no red flags about McCrae Dowless, who is now at the center of allegations into voting irregularities in the 9th Congressional District.

John Harris’ dramatic testimony came on the third day of a hearing by North Carolina’s State Board of Elections that could decide the nation’s last unresolved congressional race and has drawn national attention — and it left his father in tears.

“I love my dad and I love my mom,” John Harris said as his father cried. “I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle, OK? I think they made mistakes in this process, and they certainly did things differently than I would have done them.”

His parents did not know he was going to testify.

John Harris, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina, first raised concerns about ballot collection in Bladen County on the night of the Republican primary in 2016. Mark Harris finished second in that race, but third-place finisher Todd Johnson collected 221 of 226 mail-in absentee ballots in Bladen County in the race.

John Harris again raised concerns in April 2017, a day after Harris first met with Dowless about running an absentee ballot program in Bladen and Robeson counties. First in a phone call and then in subsequent emails, the younger Harris warned his father of both political and legal ramifications of hiring Dowless. Harris said his father told him McCrae assured them he operated legally.

“They believed what McCrae had assured them,” Harris testified. “I didn’t because I had done a deep dive into the numbers. ... I was right, unfortunately for all of us.”

// posted by montag @ 1:30 PM 0 Comments

Hedge funds, investment banks and money managers are trying to raise tens of billions of dollars this year for so-called opportunity funds, a creation of President Trump’s 2017 tax package meant to steer money to poor areas by offering potentially large tax breaks.

Little noticed at first, the provision has unleashed a flurry of investment activity by wealthy families, some of Wall Street’s biggest investors and other investors who want to put money into projects ostensibly meant to help struggling Americans. The ranks of those starting such funds include Anthony Scaramucci, the New York hedge fund executive who served briefly as Mr. Trump’s communications director.

More than 80 of the funds have sprung up since January 2018, even though the Trump administration has not finalized regulations governing them. Managers of the funds are seeking to raise huge sums of money by pitching investors on a combination of outsize returns and a feel-good role in fighting poverty.

The flood of capital is raising hopes as well as concerns. Those who championed the provision, which provides for a hefty tax break on long-term investments, believe the money can help distressed towns and neighborhoods that are still feeling the effects of the financial crisis and have barely benefited from the nine-year economic expansion. Skeptics worry that the funds will mostly target real estate and other projects that probably would have attracted investment even without the tax break, and may not deliver the returns being dangled.

The provision that created the funds was added to the tax law by Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, and had been supported by Democrats and Republicans in previous legislation. It provides capital gains tax relief for investors who finance projects in about 8,700 so-called opportunity zones spread across the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Local officials selected the zones from a group of areas deemed eligible for the designation under a federal formula that factors in income and poverty levels. The federal government has not finished setting guidelines for what types of projects qualify or what information fund managers must provide to investors and to the government.

The designated areas include heavily distressed tracts in cities like Detroit and Gary, Ind. But some zones are in gentrifying areas like the old downtown section of Las Vegas and parts of Long Island City, Queens, where Amazon said it would build a huge corporate campus before reversing course last week.

The advent of the funds has spawned conferences around the country and has drawn interest from a variety of financial players. So far, most of the funds have focused on real estate investments. Many of the Wall Street funds are geared toward major metropolitan areas on the East and West Coasts, particularly New York City. That has fueled concern that the tax break could help regions that already enjoy substantial investment.

// posted by montag @ 1:43 PM 0 Comments

The Bladen County political operative at the center of possible election fraud in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District assured the top consultant for Republican Mark Harris’ campaign that he was running a legal operation throughout the 2018 election, the consultant said Tuesday.

And he believed McCrae Dowless through Harris’ upset victory in the primary and an apparent victory in the general election. He believed Dowless until Monday, the first day of testimony before the state board of elections into voting irregularities in the district.

“I don’t know what to believe about McCrae Dowless. I don’t know whether or not to believe anything Mr. Dowless ever told me,” said Andy Yates, co-founder of the Cornelius-based Red Dome Group, a political consulting firm.

Yates testified on the second day of the board’s hearing that Dowless knew the details of absentee ballot law well and preached that he and his workers were following it carefully. He spoke one day after workers for Dowless outlined the illegal collection of mail-in absentee ballots.

“I’ve worked too hard to build up my reputation in this business, worked too hard to build up Red Dome, to hire one person and let all that be torn down,” Yates said.

State board investigators on Monday said they had uncovered “a coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme operated during the 2018 general election in Bladen and Robeson counties.” The counties are located within the 9th district. The state board has declined to certify results in the district. Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in unofficial totals.

Dowless, a convicted felon and elected official in Bladen County, is at the center of the investigation. Dowless declined to testify Monday unless he was granted immunity. Yates said Harris personally hired Dowless to conduct get-out-the-vote operations in Bladen County before Harris hired Yates.

“I felt Mr. Dowless was a done deal before I was even brought onto the campaign,” Yates testified.

In several hours of testimony, Yates explained Dowless’ relationship with the Harris campaign — chronicling near-daily phone conversations between himself and Dowless, Dowless’ craving of political information, “frequent conversations” between Harris and Dowless and how little oversight Red Dome had over Dowless, which did not require him to turn in printed invoices.

// posted by montag @ 1:20 PM 0 Comments