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The Real Story of the Syrian Family Who Donald Trump Said Might Be Terrorists

by GeorginaTindal Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Matt Chase

The couple who had panicked the nation’s right-wing politicians and pundits sits on a couch in a spartan ground-level apartment on the outskirts of San Bernardino, California. Thirty-two-year-old Samer is in a blue sweatshirt and jeans, lounging next to his wife, Sara. He has a round face and relaxed eyes; she is more angular, her eyes more direct. They’re both wearing ankle monitors. Ever since they were released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention two months earlier, they’ve kept a low profile. It took me weeks to contact them, and now they’ve agreed to tell their story. But they have some caveats: no real names, not too many details. They don’t want to stir up any more trouble than they’ve already been through.

Eight months before I met them, they were in Syria, on the phone with a smuggler. ISIS fighters were on the fringes of their small Christian village, firing mortars into it. Samer and Sara knew if the village fell there was a good chance they’d be abused or executed. There was no power, no work, and the price of food was punishing. Part of their home was blown up. Their little boys, two and five years old, were “afraid all the time,” Sara recalls. They almost never ventured outdoors. Of Syria, Samer says, “It is not a life.” So they decided to seek a new one—in America, where they hoped to join Samer’s parents and sister, who live in California.

The smuggler told them he could help, in exchange for everything they had—a valuable tract of land, the remains of their home, and all its contents. The smuggler’s network stretched across the globe, and he arranged to get them to Lebanon, then Turkey, where they waited three months before being supplied with expertly forged European passports—they won’t say which nationality—and plane tickets to Brazil. From there, they traveled north. The smuggler told them where to go, whom to meet, when to take a car, and when to fly. The passports worked at every checkpoint, border, and airport.

On November 17, Samer, Sara, and their two little boys walked across the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas, and turned themselves in to American immigration officials. Samer remembers, “I was so happy. I finally arrived here to have a safe life, a good life for my children.”

They didn’t realize they were stepping into a firestorm of anti-refugee hysteria. Four days before their arrival, ISIS-backed terrorists had attacked in Paris. After Samer and Sara entered the United States, the conservative website Breitbart proclaimed—falsely—that they and another Syrian family who had crossed with them were “illegal aliens” who had been “caught” sneaking into the country. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted a link to the story. Ben Carson said their arrival could be a sign that “our worst nightmare may be unfolding before our eyes.” Trump tweeted that they might be terrorists: “ISIS maybe? I told you so. we need a big & beautiful wall!” In the days that followed, more than 30 governors said they did not want Syrian refugees settling in their states.

Almost immediately after requesting asylum, Sara and the boys were put in one ICE detention center, Samer in another. They went through the extensive asylum interview process and were determined to have “credible fears of persecution or torture” in Syria. Within two weeks they were approved for release. ICE officials told Samer’s family in California to buy airline tickets for them. But the day before they were set to depart, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook slaughtered 14 people in San Bernardino. ICE told Samer’s family to cancel the flights to California, and Samer and Sara were denied parole. The only explanation was a vague declaration of “law enforcement interests.”

During their weeks of detention, Samer was allowed to speak to Sara only once on the phone. The boys cried every night, asking Sara where their father was. As Christmas approached, the children had been held for nearly 40 days, despite a mandate that most migrant kids should be released after three to five days. “The look on their face is a look of terror,” their lawyer, Jonathan Ryan, the executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, told me after visiting Sara at the time. “The look and the panic of a person pinned down on a hospital gurney.”

“I definitely thought America would accept me,” Samer told the Guardian. “If I had known that it was so terrible here I wouldn’t have brought my family.” On Christmas Eve, the family was finally released, reunited, and put on a flight to California.

That’s where I meet them two months later, in the warm and tidy apartment where Samer’s parents live. A cross hangs above the kitchen doorway. We drink tea in the living room as Samer and Sara lay out the terms for sharing their story. They’re wary: They don’t want to be back in the headlines, and they worry more press could endanger Sara’s mother and sister, still trapped in Syria. “They didn’t have a chance to leave,” she says. ISIS is still on the outskirts of their village.

They talk about life before the war, of their town—a small community speckled with trees and fields of crops. Sara doesn’t want to dwell on how the war has changed it. “The way the village looks is not important,” she says. “It is like all of Syria,” a landscape of broken concrete and twisted rebar.

Their troubles aren’t over. The asylum process, as Ryan puts it, is “designed so that people fall into the cracks, lose their cases on a technicality that would drive any sports fan nuts.”

But for now, Samer and Sara are piecing together a normal life. “My son started school,” she says, beaming. “Preschool. Just five years old, but he is a big boy. He is starting to learn English.” The boys, who have been playing in the living room, disappear into the kitchen and return proudly carrying potted flowers. “They bought this flower for their grandma,” Sara explains. Next they walk out holding a bag of peanut M&Ms with pleading eyes, grinning and squirming. They can play outside now. But not today. “It’s too windy!” Sara says with a laugh.

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The Real Story of the Syrian Family Who Donald Trump Said Might Be Terrorists

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Ask an Economist: Are Living Standards Higher Than They Used to Be?

by FreddyHoliday Posted on May 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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So how are we doing these days? Let’s ask some economists. Their consensus, apparently, is that we’re way better off compared to the golden days of our youth, but not so much compared to more recent years. In fact, economists are split about evenly on whether we’re collectively better off than we were before the financial crash, which seems right to me. Roughly speaking, I’d say we’ve recovered to about 2007 levels, but haven’t yet surpassed them.

But this raises a question: Why do so many Americans think they were better off 30 or 40 or 50 years ago? There are several obvious possibilities:

Wages were rising back then. They may be higher now, but it’s steady increases that make things seem great.
Sure, we lacked cell phones and 500 channels and cancer cures back in the day, but we didn’t miss them because we never had them. The fact that we have them now doesn’t really make people think they’re better off.
On a related note, all the new stuff we have doesn’t really make us happier. If we grew up with it, it’s background noise. If we didn’t grow up with it, it’s just a complicated pain in the butt that we’re forced to keep up with even though we don’t really like it much. (Except for those 500 channels, of course. Everyone loves those.)
It’s basically cultural, not economic. A lot of people really were happier 50 years ago, but it had nothing to do with living standards. Whites didn’t have to compete with blacks or Asians. Men ruled the roost. Everyone knew their place. We didn’t worry about heroin epidemics. Etc.

It’s a funny thing about living standards. Take cars. They’re way better on practically every metric you can think of compared to, say, 1960. Cars today are faster, more reliable, more comfortable, more convenient, quieter, smoother, safer, and cheaper. And they come in way more varieties than they used to.

But do people like their cars today more than they did in the 60s? Probably not. We’ve gotten jaded. Cars were still kind of cool to the postwar generation. Today nearly everyone has a car and they’re just another possession. Our automobile living standard is far higher than it used to be, but our automobile happiness probably isn’t.

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Ask an Economist: Are Living Standards Higher Than They Used to Be?

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White Teachers Think Pretty Poorly of Their Black Students

by NatalieHilton6 Posted on April 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby draws my attention to a new study about the effect of race on teacher evaluations of students. The authors took advantage of a large dataset that included evaluations of students from two teachers each. They then compared the teacher evaluations of each student based on differences in the teachers’ races.

The chart on the right tells the story. White students didn’t suffer from having a teacher of another race. Expectations of dropping out were the same and expectations of getting a college degree were actually higher. Hispanic students were modestly affected. Teachers of other races thought Hispanic students had a slightly higher chance of dropping out and the same chance of completing college.

But black students were enormously affected. Compared to black teachers, teachers of other races thought their black students had a far higher chance of dropping out and a far lower chance of completing college. Since the baseline expectation of dropping out was 31 percent for black students, a change of 12 percentage points represents a whopping 39 percent increase. Likewise, the baseline expectation of a college degree was 37 percent for black students, so a change of 9 percentage points represents 24 percent decrease.

The authors conclude with this:

The general finding of systematic biases in teachers’ expectations for student attainment indicates that the topic of teacher expectations is ripe for future research. Particularly policy relevant areas for future inquiry include how teachers form expectations, what types of interventions can eliminate biases from teacher expectations, and how teacher expectations affect the long-run student outcomes of ultimate import. To the extent that teacher expectations affect student outcomes, the results presented in the current study provide additional support for the hiring of a more diverse and representative teaching force, as nonwhite teachers are underrepresented in U.S. public schools.

Let’s ask all our presidential candidate what, if anything, they think we should do about this.

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White Teachers Think Pretty Poorly of Their Black Students

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The Staples Singers Will Revive You With These Gospel and Soul Classics

by BryantMcDonald Posted on November 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Staple Singers
Faith & Grace: A Family Journey 1953-1976
Stax/Concord

Not for gospel buffs only, the Staple Singers could make even a confirmed heathen feel blessed by the Holy Spirit. Featuring Roebuck “Pops” Staples and his children Mavis, Cleotha, and alternatively Pervis or Yvonne, the quartet evolved from local Chicago favorites to worldwide soul superstars over the course of a two-decade-plus run. Their sound drew its breathtaking beauty from the shimmering tremolo- and reverb-drenched guitar of Pops—a style his peers dubbed “nervous”—and the exuberant high harmonies of the four, with Mavis’ powerhouse voice adding a thrilling jolt to the mix.

The earliest recordings on this fabulous four-disc set capture the Staples Singers at their most visceral. The live 16-minute medley “Too Close/I’m on My Way Home/I’m Coming Home/He’s Alright” is downright hair-raising in its primal intensity. Curiously, the group’s interaction with the like-minded folk movement of the early ’60s resulted in some of their milder efforts in the form of a handful of Bob Dylan covers, although the lull was only temporary. Joining Stax Records in the late-’60s, they scored a series of secular-but-uplifting hits with foot-stomping songs like “Respect Yourself,” “I’ll Take You There,” and “If You’re Ready (Come Go with Me).”

Pops passed away in 2000, but Mavis is still going strong today. In any case, Faith & Grace testifies to their illustrious achievements.

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The Staples Singers Will Revive You With These Gospel and Soul Classics

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This Chart Shows Which Countries Are the Most Screwed by Climate Change

by SiobhanSez Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Verisk Maplecroft

One of the cruel ironies of climate change is that its impacts tend to fall hardest on the countries least equipped to manage them.

When drought or sea level rise strike the United States, communities at least have access to federal aid, top scientific expertise, public investment in expensive climate-ready infrastructure, and the like. But some of the most extreme effects of global warming are headed for developing countries—drought wiping out crops in East Africa, or catastrophic hurricanes pounding Southeast Asia—that don’t have access to those resources.

New research from Maplecroft, a UK-based risk consultancy, paints a pictures of where vulnerability to climate change is most pressing. Their analysis drew on three criteria: exposure to extreme events, based on the latest meteorological science; sensitivity to impacts (i.e., does a country have other sources of income and food supply if agriculture takes a hit?); and adaptive capacity—are the country’s government and social institutions prepared to work under adverse climate conditions and help citizens adapt to them?

Unsurprisingly, Africa and Southeast Asia ranked the lowest, while Scandinavian countries ranked the highest. (While definitely at risk from sea level rise, countries such as Norway and Sweden have rich, highly functional governments to manage adaptation.) The major global climate talks in Paris are coming up in just a couple weeks; the chart above makes it clear why it’s so important for big players like the US and China to work closely with delegations from developing countries on solutions that will provide immediate support and relief.

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This Chart Shows Which Countries Are the Most Screwed by Climate Change

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There Is Poop in Basically All Hamburger Meat

by WilmaAldrich Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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There’s a “simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill,” wrote Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. “There is shit in the meat.”

A new Consumer Reports investigation suggests that things haven’t changed much since the publication of Schlosser’s 2001 blockbuster. The team tested 300 packages of ground beef, bought from more than 100 grocery, big-box, and natural food stores in 26 cities nationwide. The result:

All 458 pounds of beef we examined contained bacteria that signified fecal contamination (enterococcus and/or non-toxin-producing E. coli), which can cause blood or urinary tract infections.

But not all burger meat is created equal. The researchers also compared the bacterial load of beef from conventionally raised (181 samples) cows to that of their no-antibiotic, grass fed, and organic peers (116 samples total), grouped under the heading “more sustainably produced.” Here’s what they found:

From “How Safe is Your Beef?,” Consumer Reports

The bacterial implications of beef production practices really emerged when the researchers tested the bacterial strains for resistance to antibiotics. Nearly a fifth of conventional ground beef carried bacteria three or more classes of antibiotics—more than double the number found in the “more sustainably produced” samples, and triple that found in samples from cows raised outdoors on grass.

From “How Safe is Your Beef?,” Consumer Reports

The article offers plenty of information that could explain these differences. As for why essentially all ground beef carries fecal bacteria, the slaughter and processing of huge animals is messy—feces caked on the hide or trapped in intestines can easily move onto the carcass. That’s not such a big deal in steaks and roasts, because the bacteria tend to stay on the surface, so “when you cook them, the outside is likely to get hot enough to kill any bugs.” But with ground beef, “the bacteria get mixed throughout, contaminating all of the meat—including what’s in the middle of your hamburger.”

Then there’s this problem: “The meat and fat trimmings often come from multiple animals, so meat from a single contaminated cow can end up in many packages of ground beef.”

As for why conventional production—source of 97 percent of US burger meat, according to CR—is moderately more likely to contain certain bacteria like E. coli, and much more likely to contain multi-drug-resistant strains, the report delivers a detailed look at the different production systems.

Conventionally raised cows start out on grass but spend the final months of their lives on feedlots, where they fatten on diets of corn and soybeans, even though “cows’ digestive systems aren’t designed to easily process high-starch foods such as corn and soy,” creating an acidic environment in the cows’ digestive tract that can “lead to ulcers and infections” and “shed more E. coli in their manure.

And corn and soy aren’t the only delicacies feedlot cows feast on.

Their feed can also include include candy (such as gummy bears, lemon drops, and chocolate) to boost their sugar intake and plastic pellets to substitute for the fiber they would otherwise get from grass. Cattle feed can also contain parts of slaughtered hogs and chickens that are not used in food production, and dried manure and litter from chicken barns.

In addition, they can also receive regular low doses of antibiotics, both to prevent infections and promote faster growth, although the Food and Drug Administration has launched a voluntary program to limit the latter use. One common feedlot antibiotic, tylosin—used to ward off liver abscesses—is in “a class of antibiotics that the World Health Organization categorizes as ‘critically important’ for human medicine,” CR reports.

The magazine recommends that consumers buy from the alternative supply chains “whenever possible”—”sustainable methods run the gamut from the very basic ‘raised without antibiotics’ to the most sustainable, which is grass-fed organic.” (The article contains ample detail on each.) And when you get it home, handle it carefully and cook it to 160 degrees. After all, there’s shit in pretty much all the ground beef.

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There Is Poop in Basically All Hamburger Meat

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12-Year-Old Twin Leaders of Burma’s "God’s Army" Inspired Twin Graphic Novelists

by MichellFincham Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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The fictionalized Htoo twins. Tomer and Asaf Hanuka

The Divine, the beautifully rendered new graphic novel from Israeli artist twins Tomer and Asaf Hanuka—creators of the comic book series Bipolar—and writer Boaz Lavie, was born of a photo.

In 2000, AP photographer Apichart Weerawong snapped an iconic shot of Johnny and Luther Htoo, 12-year-old twins who smoked cheroot cigars and led “God’s Army,” a Karen rebel faction, against Burma’s junta. Land mines, lore had it, unearthed themselves at the twins’ approach, and their soldiers were impervious to bullets.

Transfixed, the artists adapted the boys as protagonists. Their Avatar-esque story follows a pair of US mercenaries on a mission to destroy a mountaintop in fictional “Quanlom,” where they encounter a kid wolfpack aided by a dragon spirit. The real Htoo twins are grown-ups now, but “for us,” the authors write, “they will always be 12-year-olds in a photo we’ll never quite understand.”

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12-Year-Old Twin Leaders of Burma’s "God’s Army" Inspired Twin Graphic Novelists

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These Scientists Just Lost Their Lives in the Arctic. They Were Heroes.

by KimberlyHollins Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Early last month, veteran polar explorers and scientists Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo set out on skis from Resolute Bay, a remote outpost in the patchwork of islands between Canada and Greenland. Their destination was Bathurst Island, a treacherous 70-mile trek to the northwest across the frozen sea, where they planned to document thinning Arctic sea ice just a few months after NASA reported that the winter ice cover was the lowest on record.

It wasn’t hard to find what they were looking for, according to a dispatch Cornelissen uploaded to Soundcloud on April 28.

“We’re nearing into the coast of Bathurst,” he said. “We think we see thin ice in front of us…Within 15 minutes of skiing it became really warm. In the end it was me skiing in my underwear…I don’t think it looked very nice, and it didn’t feel sexy either, but it was the only way to deal with the heat.”

His next message, a day later, was an emergency distress signal picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. According to the Guardian, a pilot flying over the spot reported seeing open water, scattered equipment, and a lone sled dog sitting on the broken ice. By last Friday, rescuers had called off the search. The pair are presumed to have drowned, victims of the same thin ice they had come to study. Cornelissen was 46; de Roo had just turned 30.

Yesterday, Cold Facts, the nonprofit with whom the pair was working at the time, dispatched a snowmobile expedition to attempt to recover their belongings. You can follow their progress on Twitter here. The dog, Kimnik, was found a few days ago and is doing fine, the group said.

In a blog post on the website of the European Space Agency, Cornelissen was remembered by former colleagues as “an inspirational character, an explorer and a romantic. He had fallen in love with the spellbinding beauty of the poles and had made it a personal mission to highlight the magnitude of the human fingerprint on this last wilderness.”

It’s not clear whether the ice conditions the pair encountered were directly attributable to climate change, according to E&E News:

That the region had thin ice is evident. Perhaps the ice had been thinned by ocean currents that deliver warm water from below, or by the wind, which could generate open water areas. It is difficult to know. Climate change may have played a role, or it may not have…the impacts of the warming on ice thickness regionally can be unpredictable, ESA scientist Mark Drinkwater said.

Still, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth. We rely on the work of scientists like these to know exactly what is happening there and how it will affect those of us who choose to stay safe in warmer, drier places. Their deaths are a testament to the dedication and fearlessness required to stand on the front lines of climate change.

Rest in peace, guys.

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These Scientists Just Lost Their Lives in the Arctic. They Were Heroes.

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One Gaza Family’s Heartbreaking Story

by BrandieRitz Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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One Family in Gaza from Jen Marlowe on Vimeo.

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Rubble. That’s been the one constant for the Awajah family for as long as I’ve known them.

Four months ago, their home was demolished by the Israeli military—and it wasn’t the first time that Kamal, Wafaa, and their children had been through this. For the last six years, the family has found itself trapped in a cycle of destruction and reconstruction; their home either a tangle of shattered concrete and twisted rebar or about to become one.

I first met the Awajah family in August 2009, in the tent where they were living. I filmed them as they told me what had happened to them eight months earlier during the military invasion that Israel called Operation Cast Lead and said was a response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

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One Gaza Family’s Heartbreaking Story

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Chart of the Day: When Southwest Comes Calling, On-Time Performance Goes South

by EstelaPalfreyma Posted on December 23, 2013

Mother Jones

Here’s an interesting, unintuitive tidbit about the airline market. When Southwest enters a market, it forces incumbent carriers to lower their fares. No surprise there. But according to a recent study, it does more than that. It also reduces everyone’s on-time performance:

All three conventional measures of arrival delay indicate that airlines begin responding to the threat of entry before Southwest even threatens the route; incumbents’ on-time performance begins to worsen before Southwest actually enters the second endpoint airport, and it continues to do so following Southwest threatening the route, and following entry, as well.

As the chart on the right shows, average travel time for flights starts to increase sharply about four quarters before Southwest begins service in a new market, eventually rising by two minutes three quarters after service begins. The number of flights more than 15 minutes late rises from 18 percent to about 21 percent. Why? The authors find the same effect when other airlines enter a new market, but only if the new competitor is a low-cost carrier. Their guess? Pretty much what you’d expect: “Incumbents worsen on-time performance in an effort to cut costs in order to compete against Southwest’s low costs.”

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Chart of the Day: When Southwest Comes Calling, On-Time Performance Goes South

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