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The Disproportionately High Mortality Rate of Black Mothers and Babies :Facts, Factors, and Fatalities - Cheyenne Adderley

Throughout the history of the world, the loss of a child has always been a traumatic experience. In the past, losing children in their first year of life was a disturbingly common occurrence in the lives of many parents. Contributions that are majorly responsible for this phenomenon of post-neonatal death are diseases/infections, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), malnutrition, low birth weight, home environment issues, and troubled pregnancy. To combat this, pioneers in obstetrics/gynecology and medicine researched and developed ways in which to solve these issues. Immunizations and vaccines were developed to fight infectious diseases, education and emphasis was placed around the need for proper prenatal care, and awareness was brought to a good amount of the known dangers surrounding pregnancy. Many issues that had once plagued parenthood and pregnancies were solved. One problem that was never solved, though, would be the disproportionately high mortality rate of black mothers and babies compared to their white counterparts. Unlike the aforementioned contributions listed above, this high mortality rate is caused by a pervasive structure of systematic and societal racism that is to be explored further in the remainder of this essay. The disproportionately high mortality rate of black mothers and babies is caused by a combination of disadvantages created by societal and systematic racism, the empathy gap, and lack of access to proper prenatal medical treatment.

  The United States of America is a country that was built on the agony, anguish, and affliction of African Americans. Since it’s beginning, black lives and bodies have always been seen as being worth less than everyone else’s in economic, humanitarian, and even educational ways. There is evidence of this in slavery, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and much, much more. There is no doubt about it, racism in the United States is an unfortunately prevalent part of our society. In terms of racial discrimination in the medical industry, the proof remains plentiful and certified. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was a secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the progression of syphilis without treatment. This experiment was advertised as a treatment for bad blood for colored people. Participants were promised free food, medical examinations, and burial insurance. Hundreds of poor black men signed up. The problem and unethicality within this research is that the men were not fully informed about the truth of the research. There were 600 men in total, 399 diagnosed with Syphilis and 201 did not have this deadly venereal disease. The participants who had been diagnosed with Syphilis were not given any treatment, but were instead essentially left to die so that their bodies could be examined for medical research post-mortem (Brown). This atrocity of a medical experiment is important to one’s understanding of the disproportionately high mortality rate of black mothers and babies because it proves that there exists and has existed, a racial bias in the pain assessment and medical treatment of black people. This bias is the foundation for creating serious health problems in black mothers and babies, specifically, because it is an error in the systematic structure of the lives of one particular group. Problems in systematic structures are especially dangerous because they can impact a group of already previously disadvantaged people on different levels from different angles. In the context of the topics being analyzed, it would be something in close relation to the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms turning into a failure of empathy which perpetuates racial disparities, leading furthermore into wide scale issues similar to,”The United States’ African-American population [being] disproportionately poor. African Americans do not tend to hold employment positions that provide medical benefits” (Fauci 77). Seemingly “small” issues or biases in things that are of major importance to people’s health and livelihood creates room for large discrepancies that become dangerous as things advance and become more serious. These large discrepancies are part of the reason why black mothers are at a higher risk for pregnancies resulting in conditions (i.e. hypertension and pre-eclampsia) that cause higher rates of infant and maternal death. 

  In order to understand how these large discrepancies create and relate to lack of access, the topics of lack of access due to racial bias and their subsequent effects on the pregnancies specifically of black mothers, must be discussed. In the duration of a pregnancy, a woman’s body goes through countless transformations, whether they be physical, emotional, or in the form of something else that is a discomfort. Important necessities in order to help refrain from or stop these changes from disturbing one’s pregnancy include,” exercise and activity, maintaining a healthy weight, caring for your mental health, nutrition, and caring for your oral health” (Omama). This means that one has to have access to the time and resources required in order to maintain the necessities needed for a healthy pregnancy. Racial bias on all levels is partly responsible for perpetuating the higher mortality rate of black mothers and babies because it is what creates the lack of access gap that impacts minority mothers. It, being racial bias, is created when an obstacle is purposefully placed between a person and a thing that they need. In the past, these obstacles existed in the form of slavery or Jim Crow Laws. They were rules that were created in order to preserve the generational  downfall of black people. After the criminalization of segregation, oppressors had to become more creative with the ways in which they oppressed minority groups. This is where lack of access becomes more relevant. Despite the tremendous and widespread need for medical treatment,” many African Americans cannot effectively access medical care. This inaccessibility is due to a variety of factors, including a lack of health insurance, an inadequate number of healthcare facilities, “patient dumping,” difficulty in obtaining prescription drugs and an insufficient number of African-American doctors.” ( Fauci 71). Instead of being upfront with racism and racial bias, oppressors began to create lack of access to the resources minority groups needed to survive and exist comfortably. Once those resources were taken away, it had the same negative impact as slavery and Jim Crow laws, without actually having to be as boldly open and directly wrong. Oppressors succeeded in using lack of access as an updated form of segregation because it was subtle yet effective and able to be made to feel “normal”.  Racial bias being so deeply ingrained into the systematic design of this country to the point where it is seen as normal, is what creates widespread phenomenons such as black mothers and babies being negatively impacted in an unfortunate plethora of ways. The seemingly harmless and minute parts of racial bias all have the ability to exalt oppression. 

The creation and perpetuation of discrimination against the black race on systematic levels causes the trickle down effect that is responsible for certain phenomenons in the medical industry. Racial bias is what gives birth to negative discrepancies between races. When a person begins to look at one group of people as “the other”, they will begin to act differently towards “the other”, consciously or not. The widespread belief that somehow black people are stronger and able to withstand more struggle than others comes from “...an underlying belief that there is a single black experience of the world. Because this belief assumes blacks are already hardened by racism, people believe black people are less sensitive to pain. Because they are believed to be less sensitive to pain, black people are forced to endure more pain” (Silverstein). This may include showing favoritism to other races because of their racial background, using slurs to describe certain races, or even just seemingly harmless jokes. Racial bias is an attitude that can take place and be reflected in many different forms. Bias is not something that can be turned off or hidden. Bias will always find a way to make itself known, but unconscious bias is especially dangerous because it gives people the illusion of not having done anything wrong. It is similar to how a big portion of the general population believes that vaping is somehow a healthier and safer option compared to real cigarette smoking. In both situations, damage is still being done no matter what the appearance of the danger is because the root of the problem still exists in both situations. Unconscious bias is able to explain why things may appear to be equal even though there are still several unfair aspects to society. Implicit biases are so powerful because they have the power to impact almost every facet of life. This means unconscious bias can range from affecting the decision of a police officer choosing whether or not to pull someone over, a hiring manager deciding on who to hire for a new position, or a doctor choosing which method of care to give to a patient. All of these situations can end up being dire and life-altering situations depending on the circumstances, as is. Adding in a bias toward a certain kind of civilian, employee, or patient only ensures that an issue will arise more in that group. Racial bias is what creates the circumstances that allow for black mothers and babies to suffer medically on such a broad and undeniable scale. Implicit bias is what makes the conditions that much worse between black and white mothers. Relating back to the topic of black mothers and babies, implicit bias is a subdivision of the empathy gap. The empathy gap is a phenomenon in which people are not able to emphasize with or fully understand one’s situation because they are cognitively unaware of how to account for the decision making process and mental state of others. There are certain careers in this world that require more empathy than others. For example, doctors and nurses should be able to empathize with patients because of the considerable difference between each one and their case. Situations vary greatly and not everyone comes from the same background with the same knowledge of healthcare and how to get help. This is something that needs to be empathized with and understood because a misunderstanding of this fact is what can lead to a widening of the empathy gap. When a doctor looks at a patient and sees someone from a certain background dealing with a persistent medical condition, that is not the time to begin creating assumptions or premature judgment because when enough doctors begin to view enough of the same negative things in patients of similar backgrounds through a pessimistic lens, people begin to slip through the cracks. Doctors may unknowingly begin to dismiss what a patient feels or doubt how much pain they are truly in because they are desensitized to their humane existence due to the creation of racist or all around negative idealizations. The empathy gap creates a culture of dismissive attitudes and unfair treatment from doctors because they will not take certain cases as seriously if they do not empathize with the patient. This is why it is beyond important for doctors to equally assess, understand, listen to, and treat every patient the same way. Allowing for stereotypes and pessimistic views about a certain group of people only creates a space for those people to suffer. These stereotypes hold no real truth in society and cannot offer any real medical answer to assist a doctor in treating a patient. Empathy is a required skill when people’s lives are at risk. 

     Black mothers and babies have a disproportionately high mortality rate because of the way that society dehumanizes and downplays their existence. There are several reasons as to why and how the mortality rate became what it is, but the main reason is centered around the fact that there is a specific disadvantage placed so harshly onto black women, that it stunts their growth and progression away from phenomenons that should have already been understood and solved due to the updated society that exists in today’s world. These problems still exist because there are people that exist in today’s world, but live and acknowledge the world with the views of someone living seventy years ago. The age old stereotypes, jokes, idealizations, theories, and customs must come to an end in order for black women, mothers, and children to be able progress past the impact racial bias has already made on them. Discrimination on every level plays a part in as to why this mortality rate has been so popularly perpetuated.

  Works Cited

“America Is Failing Its Black Mothers.” Harvard Public Health Magazine, 21 Dec. 2018,                        SSSCCwww.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/america-is-failing-its-black-motRRRRRhers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf.

Brown, DeNeen L. “'You've Got Bad Blood': The Horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis  RRRRRExperiment.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 16 May 2017, RRRRRwww.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/16/youve-got-bad-blood-thRRRRRe-horror-of-the-tuskegee-syphilis-experiment/.

Fauci, Cara A.” RACISM AND HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA: LEGAL RESPONSES RRRRRTO RACIAL DISPARITIES IN THE ALLOCATION OF KIDNEYS, RRRRRwww.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/law/lawreviews/journals/bctwj/21_1/02_TRRRRRXT.htm.

“Healthy Living.” OMama, www.omama.com/en/pre-pregnancy/healthy-living.asp.

Howard, Jacqueline. “Childbirth Is Killing Black Women, and Here's Why.” CNN, Cable RRRRRNews Network, 15 Nov. 2017, RRRRRwww.cnn.com/2017/11/15/health/black-women-maternal-mortality/index.html?utRRRRRRm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf.

Silverstein, Jason. “Why White People Don't Feel Black People's Pain.” Slate Magazine, RRRRRSlate, 27 June 2013, RRRRRslate.com/technology/2013/06/racial-empathy-gap-people-dont-perceive-pain-in-otRRRRRher-races.html.

Villarosa, Linda. “Why America's Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death RRRRRCrisis.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 Apr. 2018, RRRRRwww.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-moRRRRRrtality.html?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf.

[safflowerseason]

BMTL question: is it there a u.s thing, to wait a bunch of days to the funeral? i'm kind of lost. they haven't buried amy's dad yet, right? in latin american we only spend two days doing so. we have this thing called "velório", and depending on the hour we bury the next day. and if you're catholic you have a seven day's mass the next week. i'm asking cause i'm curious and this helps me with the story

Hi Anon - thanks so much for writing in! It’s a totally valid question, as grieving rituals vary culture to culture, religion to religion. You are not wrong - they have not buried Amy’s father yet in the story. In the US, there is not a single tradition regarding the burial of a family member. It really depends on the family and their traditions and beliefs, which gave me some degree of flexibility while planning out the plot. 

For BMTL, I knew from the very beginning that Amy’s father would not be buried within a few days of his death. There needed to be a gap of time so the political and personal tension could build and explode between Amy and Dan and separate them, not to mention I had to allow enough time for Dan’s parents to arrive, Selina to cause mayhem, etc etc etc. So to make that happen, I have taken advantage of the fact that there’s no indication in canon that Amy’s family is seriously religious, so they wouldn’t feel bound to a strict timeline for the burial (unlike Dan, who comes from an American Catholic background with more fixed traditions in this area). For Amy’s family, because they are telegraphed to the audience as a stereotypical white upper-middle class all-American family, I decided their cultural and religious traditions were vaguely Protestant, in keeping with their WASP-y characterization (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Some Protestant traditions in the US are less rigid than others about the date of the burial, so I set the funeral at a church with more flexible guidelines. (Of course the Brookheimers could be Catholic or Jewish too, but we are given no indication, so I got to invent more freely).

I did give a reason for the delay in Chapter 10—one of Mr. Brookheimer’s brother had a medical procedure he couldn’t reschedule, not to mention the Brookheimer family is very, very large and extended over several states, so it would take time for everyone to be able to congregate together. I do think waiting two weeks is a little unusual, if not totally unheard of in the United States, but for the purposes of the story, I needed that time. Finally, my own personal experiences likely influenced how I originally conceived of the plot. All of my grandparents were buried at least a week after their deaths, longer in some cases, and my family’s background is in the Lutheran and evangelical Christian traditions. So at the end of the day, that’s my justification for the two week gap between Amy’s dad’s death and his burial.

Hopefully that clears things up, Anon ☺️ Thanks so much for reading and engaging with the story, and also sharing about grieving rituals in Latin America!

#bring me to light #safflower writes

[newstfionline]

Headlines: Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Radioactive lunar soil (AP) New measurements from a Chinese-German team analyzing data from the Chang’e 4 lander on the far side of the moon finds that the lunar surface is radioactive as all heck, with astronauts getting 200 to 1,000 times more radiation on the moon than experienced on Earth, or about five to 10 times the amount absorbed by passengers on a trans-Atlantic flight. This is not a problem for a quick visit, but if the objective is to land astronauts and have them settle in for a bit, they could sustain sufficient damage to cause health problems down the line.

Coronavirus pandemic on the brink of a grim new milestone: 1 million dead (Washington Post) The covid-19 death toll is on the brink of hitting 1 million. That’s as many as live in San Jose, Calif.; Volgograd, Russia; or Qom, Iran. It is a disease that peppers grieving families with indignities—no funerals, hurried burials, barely a chance to mourn. It is a pandemic that has divided countries from within, yet unites the world in common anguish and loss. In the United States, a son in Sacramento can only listen to a description of his mother’s burial in New Jersey via his daughter, the only relative permitted to attend. The dead are poor—in an Indian village, a man’s family borrows a wooden cart that a neighbor used to sell fish and carries his body to his funeral pyre. And the dead are workers—in Brazil, a man who works in a meatpacking plant does everything he can think of to protect himself, yet he brings the bug home and now his wife is dead. Across the oceans and into the biggest cities and the tiniest villages, the coronavirus has torn apart families, left children hungry, evaporated jobs and wrecked economies.

As Covid-19 Closes Schools, the World’s Children Go to Work (NYT) Every morning in front of the Devaraj Urs public housing apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city of Tumakuru, India, a swarm of children pours into the street. They are not going to school. Instead of backpacks or books, each child carries a filthy plastic sack. These children, from 6 to 14 years old, have been sent by their parents to rummage through garbage dumps littered with broken glass and concrete shards in search of recyclable plastic. In many parts of the developing world, school closures put children on the streets. Families are desperate for money. Children are an easy source of cheap labor. While the United States and other developed countries debate the effectiveness of online schooling, hundreds of millions of children in poorer countries lack computers or the internet and have no schooling at all. United Nations officials estimate that at least 24 million children will drop out and that millions could be sucked into work.

Trump’s tax revelation could tarnish image that fueled rise (AP) The bombshell revelations that President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for office and paid no income taxes at all in many others threaten to undercut a pillar of his appeal among blue-collar voters and provide a new opening for his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, on the eve of the first presidential debate. Trump has worked for decades to build an image of himself as a hugely successful businessman—even choosing “mogul” as his Secret Service code name. But The New York Times on Sunday revealed that he paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he won the presidency, and in 2017, his first year in office. He paid no income taxes whatsoever in 10 of the previous 15 years, largely because he reported losing more money than he made, according to the Times, which obtained years’ worth of tax return data that the president had long fought to keep private. At this point in the race, with voting already underway in many states and so few voters still undecided, it is unclear whether any new discoveries about Trump would make any difference. Trump’s support over the years has remained remarkably consistent, polls over the course of his presidency have found.

Ransomware Attacks Take On New Urgency Ahead of Vote (NYT) A Texas company that sells software that cities and states use to display results on election night was hit by ransomware last week, the latest of nearly a thousand such attacks over the past year against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems. But the attack on Tyler Technologies, which continued on Friday night with efforts by outsiders to log into its clients’ systems around the country, was particularly rattling less than 40 days before the election. While Tyler does not actually tally votes, it is used by election officials to aggregate and report them in at least 20 places around the country—making it exactly the kind of soft target that the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and United States Cyber Command worry could be struck by anyone trying to sow chaos and uncertainty on election night.

Massacre in Mexican bar leaves 11 people dead (Reuters) A massacre in a bar left 11 people dead on Sunday, Mexican authorities said, as the country grapples with a record homicide rate despite the government’s pledge to stop gang violence. The attorney general’s office of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato said the bodies of seven men and four women were found in the bar in the early hours of Sunday morning in the city of Jaral del Progreso. Guanajuato, a major carmaking hub, has become a recurring scene of criminal violence in Mexico, ravaged by a turf war between the local Santa Rosa de Lima gang and the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Backers turn on Britain’s PM (AFP) Boris Johnson, called dejected and dogmatic even by his partisans, is enduring a torrid time in his tumultuous premiership, and worse may lie ahead. The coronavirus pandemic is testing all world leaders. But Britain has suffered more than any other country in Europe, and now the prime minister faces a revolt by Conservative colleagues who accuse him of governing by diktat. If the Covid-19 crisis has dictated the need for emergency policies on the hoof, the government has had plenty of time to prepare for life outside the European Union. But there too, an air of mutiny hangs over parliament after Johnson picked a Brexit fight with Brussels that puts Britain on the wrong side of international law. “Conservative MPs didn’t elect Boris Johnson as their leader because they thought he’d make a great prime minister,” Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told AFP. “They elected him as their leader because they were desperate to win an election,” he said. “There’s probably always a hope that someone will grow into the job. There’s some alarm that hasn’t happened.”

Britain is part of 'arc of instability' around the EU, chairman says (Reuters) Brexit Britain is part of an “arc of instability” that has emerged around the European Union, the bloc’s chairman said on Monday, ranking London’s decision to leave the EU along with threats from Turkey, Russia, Libya and Syria. “An arc of instability has developed all around us,” European Council President Charles Michel, who chairs EU summits, said in an online address for the Bruegel think-tank. “The truth is, the British face a dilemma. What model of society do they want??” Britain left the EU, the world’s largest trading bloc, on Jan. 31 after 47 years of partnership to the huge regret of EU leaders who now insist that London accept the economic consequences of looser ties. The process of negotiating a new trade relationship and finding Britain’s new place in the world is proving complicated and has revealed divisions within political parties, society and the government itself.

India’s confirmed coronavirus tally reaches 6 million cases (AP) India’s confirmed coronavirus tally reached 6 million cases on Monday, keeping the country second to the United States in number of reported cases since the pandemic began. New infections in India are currently being reported faster than anywhere else in the world. The world’s second-most populous country is expected to become the pandemic’s worst-hit country in coming weeks, surpassing the U.S., where more than 7.1 million infections have been reported. Yet even as infections mount, India has the highest number of recovered patients in the world. More than 5 million people have recovered from COVID-19 in India and the country’s recovery rate stands at 82%, according to the Health Ministry.

Fighting Flares Between Azerbaijan and Armenia (NYT) Fighting that was reported to be fierce broke out on Sunday between Azerbaijan and Armenia and quickly escalated, with the two sides claiming action with artillery, helicopter and tanks along a disputed border. The military action centered on the breakaway province of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian separatist enclave in Azerbaijan. Ethnic tensions and historical grievances in the mountainous area north of Turkey and Iran have made kindling for conflict for decades. The fighting on Sunday, however, was reportedly more severe than the typical periodic border skirmishes, and both governments used military language describing the events as war. By early afternoon, Azerbaijan said its forces had advanced to capture seven villages and had surrounded an unspecified number of Armenian troops it was threatening to kill if they did not surrender. Armenia claimed it was holding fast and had destroyed Azerbaijani tanks and helicopters. Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister, declared a state of emergency and mobilized the country’s male population. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose country has long been at odds with Armenia, strongly backed Azerbaijan. Russia, on the other hand, is a long-standing ally of Armenia, and it has supplied the country with enormous supplies of arms since the end of its war with Azerbaijan in 1994.

Rabbis ponder COVID-19 queries of ultra-Orthodox Jewish life (AP) Must an observant Jew who has lost his sense of taste and smell because of COVID-19 recite blessings for food and drink? Can one bend the metal nosepiece of a surgical face mask on the Sabbath? May one participate in communal prayers held in a courtyard from a nearby balcony? Months into the coronavirus pandemic, ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel are addressing questions like these as their legions of followers seek advice on how to maintain proper Jewish observance under the restrictions of the outbreak. Social distancing and nationwide lockdowns have become a reality around the globe in 2020, but for religious Jews they can further complicate rites and customs that form the fabric of daily life in Orthodox communities. Many of these customs are performed in groups and public gatherings, making it especially challenging for the religious public to maintain its lifestyle. One religious publisher in Jerusalem released a book in July with over 600 pages of guidance from 46 prominent rabbis. Topics range from socially distanced circumcisions (allowed) to Passover Seders over Zoom (forbidden) to praying with a quorum from a balcony (it’s complicated).

#headlines #news

[garciaphan]

Defective Medical Devices: How to file a claim and get your Compensation?

Defective medical device claims are severe problems in the U.S. Every year, countless individuals suffer injuries due to defective medical devices that should have been recalled but were not. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated numerous lawsuits by patients who suffered severe harm after devices were implanted in the spine or treated cardiovascular disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that 68% of medical devices recalled from 2009-2012 got returned to the manufacturer for either repair or replacement. The FDA has also estimated that the it could have prevented almost half of all severe injuries and deaths caused by defective medical devices with earlier intervention.

Every year, defective medical devices get used by millions of people in the United States. These devices cause thousands of injuries and deaths. The number one cause of the problem is defective products. It’s easy to use this claim to excuse a wrong product, but what does it mean?

Types of Defects in Medical Device Claims

To receive compensation in your claim, you will need to prove that the device caused your injury and prove who was responsible for the defect.

There are three categories of defects that can lead to a defective medical device lawsuit:

1) Design Defects: A design defect claim means that the manufacturer misdesigned the defect from the start and that defective design resulted in injury to the victims, such as when necessary protection does not get included in the device’s final design.

2) Manufacturing Defects: A medical product has a manufacturing defect if its assembly or manufacturing method is initially imperfect or defective.

3) Marketing Defects: Marketing defects are mistakes made in how the products get presented to the consumers. It is usually when the consumer gets scammed into believing lofty promises made by the device manufacturer, consulting doctor, or promoter.

After realizing that your Medical Device is defective, your first step should be to contact an experienced Defective Device Attorney.

Do you need a Lawyer?

Defective Medical devices companies have teams of lawyers who work on damage claims. So you will NEED a defective medical device lawyer who has the experience and know-how to challenge medical device manufacturers and get the Compensation you want. They can evaluate your case for free, help you understand your legal options, protect your rights, help you gather necessary evidence, and fight for the maximum compensation you deserve.

Families who have experienced the tragedy of the death of a loved one due to damage from a faulty device can file a wrongful death or survival claim to recover all of the above injuries. In addition, they may get compensated for funeral expenses, burial expenses, disability, and more in light of the damage they have personally suffered.

We at Garcia and Phan have extensive experience with collective action related to various complaints, including defective products, medicines, and medical devices. Whether your device is manufactured, engineered, or labeled improperly, we can help you get compensation for injuries and other damages wherever you are in the United States. The compensation you need and deserve if you get injured due to a product defect or malfunction.

We can also provide you with a medical opinion on the severity of the injuries and their cause, which will serve as crucial evidence in your medical device damage claim. We will conduct a full investigation to help determine responsibility for your injury and gather evidence to support your claim. They’ll then consider what flaws make the device dangerous and how best to file a lawsuit based on those facts.

If a defective product has harmed you or a loved one, do not hesitate to contact an experienced attorney who will explain your rights. Suppose the manufacturer, physician, hospital, sales representative, or other health care provider fails to comply with the above requirements when selling these medical devices and harms you or your loved one. In that case, you are entitled to fair compensation.

Contact an Experienced Defective Medical Device Injury Attorney in Los Angeles, California.

Contact Garcia & Phan Lawyers. We understand California accident laws and the complexities of Personal Injuries and Wrongful deaths.

Call (714)-586-8298 for a no-cost evaluation

#personal injury attorney

[panchenkolawfirm]

Top Causes of Accidental Death in the U.S.

If you lost a loved one in an accident that resulted from someone else’s recklessness, carelessness, or negligence, an experienced Matthews wrongful death lawyer could assist you with filing a wrongful death claim or lawsuit against the at-fault party, seeking monetary redress and damages. When negligent and careless individuals cause accidents, these accidents, in turn, can bring about serious injuries, pain, suffering, and death to accident victims. Most recently, for the year 2018, accidental injury deaths in the United States totaled 167,127. Unintentional fall deaths came to 37,455, motor vehicle traffic deaths at 37,991, and unintentional poisoning deaths at 62,399. The saddest part about these troubling statistics is that many of these deaths could have been avoided had someone behaved in a reasonable, careful, and safe manner under the circumstances. If you recently lost a loved one in an accident that resulted from someone else’s negligence, then you may be in a position to file a wrongful death claim or lawsuit for monetary compensation. Although money can never fully or truly compensate for the loss of a deceased loved one, it can bring a sense of closure and justice to your loved one’s untimely passing. It can also work to offset some of the financial costs associated with a loved one’s unexpected death. The experienced and compassionate Matthews wrongful death lawyers at the Panchenko Law Firm can assist you with bringing a wrongful death claim in a timely manner and recovering the necessary monetary compensation and damages. Please give us a call today to learn more about how we could assist you with filing a wrongful death claim or lawsuit. Bringing a Wrongful Death Claim In the State of North Carolina, a wrongful death claim must be brought by the personal representative of the deceased individual’s estate. In most cases, the personal representative – or PR – is the administrator or executor of the deceased individual’s estate. Moreover, in a wrongful death claim, the PR brings the claim on behalf of the family members of the deceased individual for the losses and damages they suffered due to the decedent’s death. In terms of monetary compensation, a PR of the decedent’s estate could pursue damages for the decedent’s funeral and burial expenses, pain and suffering for loss of the loved one, and economic support that was lost due to the decedent’s premature passing. An experienced Matthews wrongful death attorney can assist you with pursuing the necessary monetary compensation in a claim or lawsuit arising from a wrongful death. Speak to an Experienced Matthews Wrongful Death Lawyer Today Losing a loved one is never easy – most especially if the loved one’s death could have been prevented. At the Panchenko Law Firm, our compassionate legal team will do everything possible to help you pursue compensation for the losses and damages you sustained because of your loved one’s untimely death. For a free legal consultation and case evaluation with an experienced Matthews wrongful death attorney, please call us today at [phone] or contact us online for more information.

[brewerlinda1995]

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most expensive state for car insurance prices is New Hampshire, which has the most expensive rate for car insurance among all those states. When looking for car insurance quotes at less than $50 a month you are asked various general guidelines for how you want to pay to insure your car. One of the following is given to a person who is willing to pay an insurance company a yearly cost for their service. The average annual insurance cost in New Hampshire is more than $2,200 per year, but it is more than double the average of $2,200, which means this is quite expensive. What is the best car insurance for car insurance in New Hampshire? When buying insurance for your car you’ll normally see this amount written as 2x per year. The amount will change to 1x every year for example if you are buying your first policy from an older company. This will also affect whether you can be claimed on your auto insurance policy. As a company, You re almost always going to be required to carry physical damage. most expensive state for car insurance premiums, Iowa is among the states with the highest premiums. According to our research, Cedar Hill has the highest premiums for any ZIP code in Iowa. Cedar Hill residents can save by bundling with their auto insurance, insuring up to four cars, driving with the same agency and signing up for the same insurance company. Cedar Hill homeowners also benefit from a relatively low rate on car repairs. Of the seven Iowa counties examined, Cedar Hill had the highest average car repair costs in the state according to the, which includes Cedar Hill. Here is a list of Iowa’s cheapest insurance and financial services companies. On average, Americans spend around $825 annually for their auto coverage. However, rates and coverage tend to vary by a myriad of factors, usually due to who owns the policy – not whether insurers are getting money from the policies they protect. Some are based on risk and some are based on risk factors, meaning you’re more likely to find the cheapest car insurance for you – despite. most expensive state for car insurance. The average premium is $1,838 on an annual basis, which is higher than other states and far higher than the national average of $1,313. States like Arizona and California are the only two regions on which we have an option to see the cheapest rate. Is California Car Insurance Cheap? California has one of the highest premiums in the nation for car insurance. The cheapest rates are across every driver profile: $1,838 for 20-year policies and $1,228 for 30-year policies. California drivers without driving s age or experience can get a free premium online, by phone, or in person, by visiting . Also referred to as “Cheap” coverage is . It can be a good choice if you’ve got very little to lose if an accident results in damages or losses to car or property. Also referred to as “,” it can protect you against damages to your car in an accident. No.

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The top five states with the highest auto insurance rates are (1) LA, (2) MI, (3) OK, (4) MT, and (5) CA. Louisiana has the highest auto insurance rate at $2,500/yr. or $208.33/mo. On average, drivers with a good record can expect to pay around $118/month in the U.S.

The top five states with the highest auto insurance rates are (1) LA, (2) MI, (3) OK, (4) MT, and (5) CA. Louisiana has the highest auto insurance rate at $2,500/yr. or $208.33/mo. On average, drivers with a good record can expect to pay around $118/month in the U.S. (not including high deductibles). If you’re involved in an accident without insurance, you can expect to pay thousands in medical bills in the following states ($1,050/month): Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Below is the average annual cost of car insurance for people 45 years old, with a good credit score. The car insurance quotes will vary depending on which state you live in; vehicle insurance quotes are also based on your credit score. The cheapest state for minimum liability insurance is California, which averages $972. This is based on data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Average auto insurance quotes include a deductible, additional coverages, rates and discounts, and are guaranteed never to increase. Liability limits are higher in certain states than they are in others. For example, California’s high liability minimums come in.

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Can insurance companies charge different rates in different states? Do they even compare rates in the states in question and what is the average one? Is that fair? I am looking into it but for me a very good insurance. Can they give me that? I am wondering how much will he get in the way of saving/reaping their death benefit. What is the best that is offered? What is the cheapest insurance that will work the best and save my wife a good amount? Thank You Thanks again for your question. The answer is: it depends. Sometimes the answer is a lot of information. If your wife is pregnant it is important that you provide the medical exam so that the medical exam results would reflect the true risk that she poses as a driver or ride-along user. If you are not sure what are you and your wife doing, you can look on the safety ratings that you have provided at insurance companies. This information is provided to you in order to be able to make a best guess about your claim. The most comprehensive test will.

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Compare Renters Insurance Rates Instantly. You don’t pay a rate before you go on a trip. For example, there’s no fee if you’re visiting a dentist. If you’re traveling to an out-of-network location, you could expect to pay a rate as high as $2,700. But that really is the price you are paid for your experience and whether you’re traveling out of or out of the city for shopping alone or for a short trip out of town. What I m trying to show here is some of the information on my Trip Insurance Quote app that can take a significant toll on how much you pay for your travel. This goes over what is necessary, what is not and how far you will be to be to obtain a quote. There are a lot of factors that also go to affect a rate and how much you pay for your trip. Most of which apply to insurance prices. In many states, insurance premiums are determined by what is going to.

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The Most Expensive States for Auto Insurance Rates

The Most Expensive States for Auto Insurance Rates The most expensive state for car insurance is New York, with premiums averaging at more than $1,200 annually. Compared to some states, New York’s cost for car insurance tends to exceed the national average. Insurance Coverage Levels New York drivers must follow all state and local laws when driving. Here are the coverages they require: Condo insurance : Fires are covered by renters and homeowners insurance. Farm and ranch insurance : Bail bonds and crop insurance are not covered. Umbrella insurance : Lenders usually pay more for auto insurance than the homeowners do. Commercial automobile insurance : You can bundle your car insurance policy with home and renters, and your insurance company generally pays less for claims related to your driving. Car insurance is often confusing. What’s the cheapest state for car insurance? California, Hawaii, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. are the most expensive.

Is there anything else at the state level that can influence auto insurance rates?

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[posterboy4duality]

‘You’ve got bad blood’: The horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment

In the fall of 1932, the fliers began appearing around Macon County, Ala., promising “colored people” special treatment for “bad blood.”

“Free Blood Test; Free Treatment, By County Health Department and Government Doctors,” the black and white signs said. “YOU MAY FEEL WELL AND STILL HAVE BAD BLOOD. COME AND BRING ALL YOUR FAMILY.”

Hundreds of men — all black and many of them poor — signed up. Some of the men thought they were being treated for rheumatism or bad stomachs. They were promised free meals, free physicals and free burial insurance.

What the signs never told them was they would become part of the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” a secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the progression of the deadly venereal disease — without treatment.

On Tuesday, the Tuskegee History Center will mark the 20th anniversary of its founding and President Bill Clinton’s apology to the survivors of the experiment with a day-long program devoted to the fallout of the study. It destroyed the trust many African Americans held for medical institutions — a legacy that persists today.

[When Henrietta Lacks had cervical cancer, it was a ‘death sentence.’ Her cells would help change that.]

“These anniversaries offer a unique opportunity for us to remind America and the world of the medical injustice that occurred here in Macon County,” said Fred Gray, the civil rights attorney who brought a class-action lawsuit on behalf of unwitting study participants. “We have to continue to tell their story so that such injustices never happen again.”

Men who participated in the experiment, part of a collection photos in the National Archives labeled “Tuskegee Syphilis Study. 4/11/1953-1972.”

The study recruited 600 black men, of which 399 were diagnosed with syphilis and 201 were a control group without the disease. The researchers never obtained informed consent from the men and never told the men with syphilis that they were not being treated but were simply being watched until they died and their bodies examined for ravages of the disease.

Charles Pollard, one of the last survivors, recalled that he heard that men were receiving free physicals at a local one-room schoolhouse, according to the James H. Jones book “Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.”

“So I went over, and they told me I had bad blood,” Pollard remembered. “And that’s what they’ve been telling me ever since. They come around from time to time and check me over and they say, ‘Charlie, you’ve got bad blood.’ ”

In the book, Herman Shaw, a farmer, recounted hearing about the study as a kind of health care program. “People said you could get free medicine for yourself and things of that kind, and they would have a meeting at Salmon Chapel at a certain date.” So he went.

Initially, when the study began, treatment for syphilis was not effective, often dangerous and fatal. But even after penicillin was discovered and used as a treatment for the disease, the men in the Tuskegee study were not offered the antibiotic.

“All I knew was that they just kept saying I had the bad blood — they never mentioned syphilis to me. Not even once,” said Pollard, who added: “They been doctoring me off and on ever since then. And they gave me a blood tonic.”

Shaw explained: “We got three different types of medicine. A little round pill — sometime a capsule — sometime a little vial of medicine — everybody got the same thing.”

Although originally projected to last six months, the study extended for 40 years. “Local physicians asked to assist with study and not to treat men,” the Centers for Disease Control reported in a timeline of the experiment. “Decision was made to follow the men until death.”

Eunice Rivers, a local nurse, was recruited by doctors to serve as a recruiter and conduit between researchers and the men. Nurse Rivers, as she became known, kept records of the men and drove them to government doctors when they visited the community. She took them to doctors’ appointments in “a shiny station wagon with the government emblem on the front door, according to “Bad Blood.” On one occasion, she followed a man to a private doctor to make sure he did not receive treatment.

In 1945, according to the CDC timeline, penicillin was “accepted as treatment of choice for syphilis.” The U.S. Public Health Services created what they called “rapid treatment centers” to help men afflicted with syphilis — except the men in the Tuskegee study.

In 1966, a public health service investigator raised concerns about the study. Peter Buxtun wrote to the director of the U.S. division of venereal diseases about the ethics of the experiment. But the agency ignored Buxtun’s concerns.

Buxtun eventually leaked information about the study to an Associated Press reporter named Jean Heller, who years later called it “one of the grossest violations of human rights I can imagine.” On July 26, 1972, Heller’s story appeared on the front page of the New York Times, revealing that the men had deliberately been left untreated for 40 years.

[Syphilis victims in U.S. study went untreated for 40 years]

The study was finally brought to a halt, and the following year, a congressional subcommittee held hearings on the Tuskegee experiment.

In 1973, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the men in the study by Gray, the civil rights lawyer who had represented Rosa Parks. Pollard was among those he represented.

A $10 million out-of-court settlement was reached in the case. “The U.S. government promised to give lifetime medical benefits and burial services to all living participants,” the CDC reported.

In 1974, Congress passed the National Research Act, which was aimed at preventing the exploitation of human subjects by researchers.

On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton issued an apology to the eight remaining survivors of the experiment:

“The United States government did something that was wrong — deeply, profoundly, morally wrong,” Clinton said. “It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. To the survivors, to the wives and family members, the children and the grandchildren, I say what you know: No power on Earth can give you back the lives lost, the pain suffered, the years of internal torment and anguish. What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry.”

Herman Shaw, one of the last survivors of the Tuskegee study, raises his arms with praise as President Bill Clinton apologizes for the infamous experiment. (Susan Biddle/Washington Post)

#conspiracy #coverup #illuminati #corruption #secret societies

[opedguy]

Trump Responded Quickly to SARS CoV-2 Pandemic

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), May 4, 2020.--Dcmocrats and the sympathetic media continue to pound 73-year-old President Donald Trump for a slow response to the coronaviurs AKA CoV-2 or Covid-19 global pandemic.  Trump banned flights to China Jan. 31, only a week after Deputy Chinese Foreign Minister Le Lucheng said April 29 that China locked down Wuhan Jan. 23, six weeks before the U.N.’s World Health Organization [WHO] delared a global pandemic March 11.  Democrat and their fans in the press want to play politics with the coronavirus crisis, six months before the Nov. 3 presidential election.  WHO’s Ethiopian Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyseus said Jan. 14 that whatever infectious disease situation they had in Wuhan, China, it did not involve “human-to-human” transmission.  Tedros minimized, as a special favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, the nature of the epidemic, piling up corpses at Wuhan’s 14 crematoriums.

           Wuhan authorities announced Jan. 28 they would give free cremations to Wuhan residents, banning burials Feb. 2.  How Trump’s detractors think there’s anymore the president could have done is anyone’s guess.  Sounds a lot like politics, knowing the timeline of events.  Trump said he shut down flights from China Jan. 31, two weeks after Tedros said there was no “human-to-human transmission” in Wuhan, when, in fact, Chinese authorities has dispatched China’s leading virus experts, People Liberation Army [PLA] May. Gen. Chen Wei Jan. 28, five days after Lucheng confirmed China locked down Wuhan.  Trump said even 80-year-old Chief of Infectious Disease expert at the National Institute’s of Health Dr. Anthony Fauci told Trump early on in late January that he didn’t see a major SARS CoV-2 outbreak in the U.S. Yet Democrats and the media continue to blame Trump.

            With disinformation coming from China and the U.S. media, Trump finds himself squeezed in an information war with Democrats and the U.S. press.  Asked at a Fox News Town Hall May 3 at the Lincoln Memorial by a video-caller about his abrasive tone with the press his daily coronavirus briefings, Trump asked the caller to look at his  treatment by the media.  Trump said not since Abraham Lincoln, has the press been so brutal toward any president. Trump acknowledged that when the SARS CoV-2 threat was bandied around in January, he was in the middle of an impeachment trial.  Few in Washington were thinking about an impending infectious disease crisis. Democrats like to cite a speech Fauci gave in 2017 at Georetown University warning of a future global pandemic.  “There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infections disease,” Fauci said.

            Whether a scientist or researcher or talks about future infectious disease outbreaks, earthquakes or droughts, that doesn’t mean a president at the time was negligent because he didn’t lock down the country, order more ventilators or vaccines to prepare. Yet Democrats and their friends in the press want to pin the 1,208,036 cases and  69,384 U.S. deaths on Trump.  If there’s anyone to blame, the press should be looking at China and WHO, who failed to tell member-states to lock down before March 11, two months after China sent million of infected tourists to vacation in the United State and Europe. Obviously, you need to take seriously and do the kind of things the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] and Department of Homeland Security is doing,” Fauci told Newsmax January 26.  Democrats and the press have been accusing the White House of a slow response.

          Trump wanted the public to hear from Fauci himself, not the fake news media blaming Trump for everything possible. “But this is not a major threat to the people of the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about,” Fauci told Newmax.  Democrats and press won’t quote Fauci directly, and only recently was asked by a House committee to testify about the U.S. response to the coronavirus crisis.  Fauci said Jan. 26 the virus was “a very low risk to the Unties States,” showing how even career infectious disease experts get things wrong.  Without warnings from CDC, WHO or his NIH’s Fauci  back in January, it’s remarkable that Trump acted so quickly to shut down flights from China.  With China and WHO covering up the runaway infectious disease crisis in Wuhan, Trump response was actually very proactive, yet got flak from Tedros Feb. 3.

            China and the WHO bear much of the blame for the delayed response to the silently incubating coronaviurs pandemic.  China and WHO know that millions of infected Chinese citizens traveled to the U.S. and Europe over the 2019 holidays and into January with Chinese New Year.  Called “China-centric” by Trump April 7, turns out it’s a lot more insidious than getting preferential treatment.  Tedros owed his job of Director-General to Xi, agreeing to hold Wuhan’s spiraling epidemic secret until it was too late.  Tedros, like China, has done everything possible to deny responsibility to for failing to properly notify the world about a developing pandemic in Wuhan.  By the time Tedros declared the global pandemic March 11, the world was massively infected with SARS CoV-2, leaving all countries scrambling to contain the virus.  Blaming Trump for a “delayed” response is pure politics.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

[homelanddefense5486-blog]

When my dad died.. things are changing presidential in the community of Blair county PA.. he died he was 86 years old.. his Last Name Was Bush or Cheney.. or Mr Wealth.. he wanted people to get off drugs stop killings.. He Was Above The President 1954 -2009

#pennsylvania commonwealth #us department of government homeland defense #blair county pa #homeland security #u.s president #national security united states of america #u.s presidential police #presidential u.s. congress #u.s. department of state #u.s. supreme court #u.s. senate #wrongful burial wrongful death u.s. united states #u.s presidential dea

[covid19updater]

COVID19 UPDATES 04/04/2020

MORNING:

 US:  U.S. coronavirus death toll reaches 7,000 after nearly 1,000 new deaths were reported yesterday

NYC: Store owners boarding up buildings across Manhattan 18% of police force now out sick. LINK

US:  #BREAKING US sets new global record with 1,480 virus deaths in 24 hours: Johns Hopkins

California: A large refrigerator now sits outside Regional Medical Center in San Jose. A source in the hospital system tells @nbcbayarea it’s just precautionary IN CASE of a surge in South Bay #COVID19 deaths

NYC: New York City has deployed at least 45 mobile morgues as funeral homes struggle to deal with the over 1,800 coronavirus deaths

Mexico: Mexican health ministry registers 1,688 #coronavirus cases, 60 deaths

China: China orders 200,000 body bags from Taiwan; Panic-buying erupts across China amid #CCPvirus (#coronavirus) #pandemic

RUMINT: I’m getting some absolutely fucking wild uncle intel from a source in healthcare. That story about the nurse who was told to treat patients without a mask? True. It’s a total shitshow out in the COVID wards/hospitals. No one knows what to do. Shits being prescribed that they have no business prescribing. Conditions are awful. Anyone with medical credentials being signed up for a government draft - details as yet unknown, the managers aren’t explaining it. Special corona-only units that don’t have to abide by normal rules. Nurses and doctors leaving and never coming back, Atlas Shrugged style. Buckle up folks. We’re fucked.

California: San Diego County order will make it mandatory for businesses that interact with the public to use cloth face coverings for their employees starting Saturday; that includes grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations and restaurants -- the latter a late addition following a request from San Diego's Restaurant Association to be added, according to Supervisor Nathan Fletcher.

RUMINT (New York): From my nurse relative in Buffalo: "I just feel that I have to let everyone know that Cuomo is stealing the vents from our hospitals for NYC!!! He is sending the National Guard to get them as our hospitals are telling him they are in use...They are using one vent with split tubing for two patients and anesthesia machines as vents!! We do not have enough and he wants to steal them!!! Sacrifice us for NYC!!! They need to bail themselves out for a change! Pass the word if you think it’s wrong!"

RUMINT: "You cannot get rid of it, it is a RNA virus that encodes parts of itself into your genome, so every time your body recreates cells, that viral code is also part of it. There are 4 inserts of HIV protein sequences in the genome of nCoV2-19/SARS2 which is why some are having long recovery periods and those who recover do not keep antibodies against the virus for long afterward, usually no longer than 3 months. The SARS sequence added in suggests that the virus is intended to always present worse after first infection in clinical settings. Plainly put, every time you get it will get worse than the last till it kills the person. It is essential to NEVER GET THE VIRUS."

New Jersey: TSA worker at Newark airport dies of COVID-19, becoming agency's first casualty. Francis “Frank” Boccabella III, who worked as a explosive detection canine handler at at Newark Liberty International Airport. He was 39 years old. LINK

Honduras:  The government of Honduras has instructed mayors in the country to supply land that may serve as a mass grave. The authorities fear more deaths from the corona pandemic. "Local authorities need to find land suitable for mass graves in case massive burials are needed because the number of corpses exceeds capacity," the authorities said in a statement. A curfew has been instituted in the Central American country since March 15 and residents must keep a social distance. In Honduras, 222 cases of the virus are known and fifteen patients have died. President Juan Orlando Hernandez warned that "this is only the beginning" of the outbreak in his country and the situation is about to become "a lot more difficult"

Spain: After three weeks under lockdown, Spain has reported 809 further deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing to 11,744 the number of fatalities in the outbreak. So far 124,736 have been infected, which is now more than in Italy.

US: US singer Pink has said she tested positive for the coronavirus

ITALY: 70% of blood donors test positive for coronavirus

UK: #BREAKING UK records 708 more COVID-19 deaths, fourth successive daily high 

AFTERNOON/EVENING:

NYC: BREAKING: New York state reports 10,841 new coronavirus cases and 630 new deaths since last update, raising total to 113,704 cases and 3,565 dead

Japan: The capital reported 118 new COVID-19 infections on Saturday, marking the first time the single-day total has surpassed the century mark as Japan continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.

Italy: BREAKING: 4,805 new cases of #coronavirus and 681 new deaths in Italy. Total reaches to 124,632 confirmed cases and 15,362 confirmed deaths.

NYC: EXCLUSIVE - Multiple patients infected with coronavirus were transferred to the hospital ship Comfort from the Javits Center in New York by mistake, three U.S. officials tell Fox News.LINK

UK: UK death rate of coronavirus patients in intensive care tops 50 per cent, study finds LINK

World: Spies Are Fighting a Shadow War Against the Coronavirus LINK

UK:  Five London bus workers have died after contracting coronavirus. Transport for London (TfL) said it was "extremely saddened" by the deaths, while mayor of London Sadiq Khan said he was "absolutely devastated".It is understood three were drivers and two were controllers LINK

Sweden  #BREAKING: - Sweden is considering reporting France to the European Commission after 4 million face masks ordered by Mölnlycke from China were stopped in France. The Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs says that France's action is a violation of the internal market rules.

US: U.S. President Donald Trump says 1,000 additional military personnel are being deployed to New York City

UK: UK Hospital tells patients NOT to go to A&E even in an emergency because they're running out of oxygen in coronavirus crisis

EVENING:

South Dakota: South Dakota state representative Bob Glanzer died from coronavirus, the first sitting U.S. lawmaker to die from COVID-19.

Michigan: Prisoner dies in cell, COVID-19 virus spreads to 200 inmates in Michigan.

China: #BREAKING - CHINESE PRESIDENT XI JINPING ACCUSES UNITED STATES OF STARTING "PROPAGANDA WAR" AGAINST THEM, CITING PRES. TRUMP'S "CHINESE VIRUS" COMMENTS.

US: Pres ends press briefing, which lasted 1 hr 43 mins, repeating words of caution about the upcoming week. “We are really coming up on a time that’s going to be very horrendous. Probably a time like we’ve never seen in this country." He likened the numbers to World War 1 or II.

NYC: BREAKING: New York City reports 349 coronavirus deaths since morning update

[shirlleycoyle]

Climate Change Could Erase Human History. These Archivists Are Trying to Save It

Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery is a giant place of memory.

For one, there’s the gravestones, mausoleums, statues, and stone structures. It’s hard to describe the scale of it. They rise up, respectfully spaced out, on nearly every patch of ground for miles, up and down hills, under trees, unfurling everywhere for 478 acres.

Then there’s the archives. Not every grave at Green-Wood gets an intentional visitor, like a descendent, or a history-lover seeking out a specific name and story. But every grave, every lot, and every person is meticulously documented, and thereby remembered by dozens of paid archivists and volunteers. Everyone buried in Green-Wood has the privilege of being considered a part of capital-H History. If Green-Wood is a city, then the archives are a census for everyone lucky enough to be a resident.

On a rainy day in early September, Green-Wood archivist Tony Cucchiara gave me a tour of the massive Green-Wood archival system, accounting for all 570,000 burials. Green-Wood has millions of pages of burial orders, lot information, and family information spread across three buildings.

Cucchiara explained the information in these files is useful to historians studying disease, to genealogists, and to New York history generally. These records are also useful to descendants of the deceased, to people who want to learn about their families and look for connection.

However, climate change poses long-term and short-term threats to archives around the country. In a worst case scenario, climate change could mean that irreplaceable records documenting the course of human history are lost forever.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Most of the island lost power, and people off the island were unable to get in touch with their families and friends. People on the island struggled to get access to food and water. About 3,000 people died both in the immediate violence of the storm and in the aftermath.

The hurricane’s destruction didn’t stop with its assault on human life and livelihood. It also assaulted Puerto Rican culture. Several archives and cultural institutions on the island—including The Archivo General, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña main offices, the National Gallery, University of Puerto Rico (UPR), the Museum of the Americas, the National Guard Museum, La Casa del Libro, and the Castillo San Cristóbal—were damaged from the storm. Irreplaceable materials were lost.

Art museums, housing delicate paper artifacts, faced a plague of mold and mildew as generators were appropriately allocated to the island's most vulnerable people. As reported by the New York Times, the museum curator had a maintenance crew drill massive holes into the museum walls in order to get some degree of ventilation. The Museum of Puerto Rican Art's sculpture garden lost 90 percent of its collection. Roofs were blown off buildings. Windows were shattered.

Natural disasters have destroyed cultural artifacts before. Earthquakes, for instance, have damaged or destroyed temples and buildings in China, Greece, Puerto Rico, and Japan. However, climate change-driven disasters has made the safety of cultural artifacts into an urgent issue. In the past few years, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Harvey, and Hurricane Irma have damaged dozens of museums and cultural centers in New York City, Houston, Florida, and the Caribbean. This isn’t just bad luck. Because of climate change, hurricanes are happening more frequently. And since human culture is disportionately centered on coastlines, cultural repositories are at risk.

We’re not just in the midst of a climate crisis. We’re in the midst of a cultural reckoning. Politicians are debating how or if we should adapt for the future, with responses ranging from calls for a sweeping Green New Deal, to calls for “realistic,” lightweight regulation on polluting titans, to outright climate denial. Meanwhile, something else is going on. Archivists and conservators are taking stock of human culture. They’re asking, what do we have, and what could we lose in the next 100 years? Is there any way to save what’s at risk?

This problem prompted archivists Eira Tansey, Ben Goldman, and Whitney Ray to complete the Repository Data Project, a growing database that currently catalogs more than 25,000 archives in the United States, including major university libraries, small museums, corporate archives, and art facilities.

The reason for making this database, Tansey told Motherboard, is to figure out which facilities are at risk of sea level rise and worsened storm surges over the next 100 years. If we know what’s at risk, theoretically, we can plan and prepare for the worst. Or alternatively, we can at least know which facilities need help when the next disaster strikes.

The study brought up an uncomfortable question. What happens if we abandon culturally rich areas? What will happen to the archives in these areas, to the history stored in them?

“As there will be inevitable migration and abandonment of certain areas, the only traces that will be left of some places is in the archives,” Tansey said. “And so, we have a large amount of responsibility for what it looks like to do our work in the context of climate change.”

But of course, the Repository Data Project isn’t just about archivists taking cultural stock. The project, at its core, forces us to ask difficult questions. In a changing world, one where climate change will change the way coastlines look and likely the way governments function in upcoming decades, who and what will we choose to remember?

Some archivists are organizing teach-ins for people to learn about how to protect their histories. Archivists are taking millions of records, and one by one, putting them in folders and vaults designed to withstand the worst conditions a warming world will bring. Archivists are starting to realize that we need to adapt to a changing world, because our cultural memory is at stake.

Why Do We Archive?

The creation of records is a fundamentally political act.

We archive music recordings and films. We archive flyers, pamphlets, books, newspapers, and images from social movements like the civil rights movement, feminist activism, LGBTQ+ organizing, and the labor movement. Records have the opportunity to represent the lives, stories, and histories of historically marginalized communities not protected by their governments or society at large.

“Even if you never step foot in an archive, you benefit from archives,” Tansey said. “Because places like the National Archives hold tons of records that document people's rights and their own histories.”

We also produce birth records, photographs, newspapers, books, letters, advertisements, registrations, lists, memorandums, and death records. But we don’t do this just for the hell of it. The U.S. has a long history of slavery and colonialism, and these organizations rely upon bureaucracy and paper-pushing.

Slave logs were used to dehumanize enslaved people and convert them from people to cargo. Census records, among other things, were used to help the U.S. government track down Japanese-Americans and place them in internment camps.

So what do we communicate when we preserve records? Sometimes, the knowledge in records is useful because the governments and corporations will need those records in the future. Other times, we say that the knowledge in those records could be useful in the future. We say that the communities represented in those records matter and have a place in our collective memory.

Image: Green-Wood Cemetery archives. Taken by Caroline Haskins.

The world isn't going to blow to smithereens in 11 years. (This viral conclusion from a recent climate change report is just factually wrong.) But the UN’s committee of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in October that we will need to fundamentally and restructure our governments and global economic system if we want to avoid an absolute worst-case warming scenario.

As climate change warms the Earth, it also warms our oceans. Since warm oceans power storm systems like hurricanes and typhoons, climate change has brought more frequent hurricanes, and hurricanes that are more severe on average. Now consider the fact that storms have been getting slower, on average, for the past 70 years. The longer that a storm is centered on an area, the more time the storm has to incur wind and flooding damage. Basically, worse storms are happening more often.

Human culture is often stored in at-risk areas. According to the UN, 40 percent of the world's population lives within 60 miles of a coastline, and about 10 percent of the world's population lives in coastal areas that are less than 10 meters above sea level. Additionally, out of all cities with populations over five million, two thirds of them in coastal areas are at risk of inundation due to sea level rise.

When climate change-fueled storms damage archive buildings, wind, water, and abrupt humidity can quickly damage invaluable records beyond repair. Even the most well-funded facilities are at risk of storm-driven damage, especially if they’re in coastal areas.

Regional and local facilities, which tend to have less robust funding than federally funded facilities or major research institutions, are at an even higher risk. Hurricane Katrina, damaged countless local records for people living along the Gulf Coast. “Property deeds, birth certificates, and personal papers, as well as records documenting rights and entitlements, such as Social Security and veterans' benefits" were damaged on a massive scale. Cultural artifacts, botanic gardens, museums, and historic locations throughout the Gulf Coast were also damaged.

Archives and cultural centers face long-term risks because of climate change, completely independent of extreme events like hurricanes. Climate change is making the world hotter and more humid, on average, and heat and humidity are precisely the conditions that put delicate paper documents and art at risk.

Responding and adapting to climate change forces us to ask what we owe to each other. We have to confront which communities we are willing to protect, whether we are willing to make reparations for past injustices, and whether we have the potential to build a better world than the one that got us into this mess. How can we build a better world if we don’t have the history of the world we come from?

The Repository Data Project

The “US Archival Repository Location Data” project—“Repo data” project, for short—lives on the website of the Open Science Foundation, where academics and researchers can easily share their findings publicly. According to a state summary sheet, the Repo data project has documented the existence of 25,771 archives at 18,614 addresses. The data is also posted on GitHub.

Eira Tansey, one of the two principal investigators of the Repo Data project alongside Ben Goldman, said the project began with a grant from the Society of American Archivists, and their goal was simple: document the existence of as many archives in the U.S. as possible. Ironically, although the job of professional archivists is to catalog and store data, there was no comprehensive list or data set of all U.S. archives until this project.

“It’s not like hospitals—we know every hospital in the United States because they’re highly regulated,” Tansey said. “No such thing exists for archives.”

Tansey and Goldman hired then-graduate student Whitney Ray in 2017 to help with the project. The team reached out to about 150 regional archive associations and asked them to send any records they had listing archives in their field. Tansey said that this work collectively took from mid-2017 through the early months of 2019.

A large part of the Repo Data project was determining what exactly counts as an archive.

“There are a lot of people where when they think of archives, they think, ‘OK, it’s a very protective space where you go and you put on white gloves, and you have to be a historian that has a good reason to go through these things,’” Tansey told Motherboard. “But if we think of archival records as being things that document people’s daily lives, then maybe they exist in places like public libraries, or small town halls, or places that we don’t necessarily think of as archives.”

Tansey and Goldman also collaborated with Penn State University geographer Tara Mazurczyk and PSU librarian Nathan Piekielek to assess how these archives would be impacted by climate change. Their paper, which was published in the journal Climate Risk Management in 2018, found that climate change posts a severe risk to archives.

According to the study, 98.8 percent of archives are likely to be affected by at least one climate risk factor, such as sea level rise, storm surge, flooding, increased rain, warmer temperatures, or humidity. The researchers assessed conditions in a “business as usual” scenario, assuming that we collectively do little to nothing to mitigate climate change. The finer details of the findings were grim:

18 coastal locations would be completely flooded with a 1.8-meter rise in sea level.

84 coastal locations would go underwater with a direct hit from a category 4 storm.

92 coastal locations could warm 10 degrees Fahrenheit or more by 2100

93 coastal locations could get an additional 10 inches of rain each year by 2100, compared to today.

Image: Slide from presentation made by Tansey and Goldman showing six feet of sea level rise, a possible level of change in about a century that assumes a “business as usual” nonresponse to climate change, overlain with known archive locations in Louisiana.

“There are going to be some places where it won’t be possible to live anymore—or, if people do live in them, then we will have a very different relationship with what it looks like,” Tansey said. “In some places, the only documentary traces left will be in archives.”

This isn’t a far-off concern. As the Repo Data Project team was cataloging U.S. archives, Hurricane Irma struck Florida and the Caribbean. Fletcher Durant, head of conservation and preservation at the University of Florida, asked the team for its list of archives in Florida. Durant was volunteering for the American Institute for Conservation’s National Heritage Responders, which gives archives resources in the wake of disasters like hurricanes.

“We actually called over 500 organizations in the state of Florida,” Durant said. “If they had collections that were damaged and needed conservation assistance, of if they wanted assistance working through the FEMA paperwork, we could put them in touch with FEMA folks that might help them.”

Durant said that of the 500 archives they contacted, thankfully, only 18 of them reported any damage to their collection. They reported leaking roofs, broken windows, and fallen trees, which compromised the climatic conditions inside the facilities and put paper materials at risk of water damage.

Since Irma, Florida has been hit by three tropical storms and two hurricanes, Michael and Dorian. This is going to keep happening. Archives in Florida, and coastal regions generally, will get wetter, more battered, and more humid. It’s not a matter of whether records are going to get lost. It’s a matter of which records will get lost, and whether we know they’ve been lost.

Image: Slide from presentation made by Tansey and Goldman showing six feet of sea level rise, a possible level of change in about a century that assumes a “business as usual” nonresponse to climate change, overlain with known archive locations in Florida.

Intuitively, one might think that a solution to mitigating the risks that climate change poses to archives is simple: just digitize the archives. But digital archives face a host of threats. Accidental server crashes have temporarily wiped data stored in digital archives, authoritarian regimes have wiped digital archives on a whim. And theoretically, water damage could damage sensitive servers that store digital records.

Archivists also have to maintain the digital archive in addition to maintaining the physical archive. Digital archives aren’t a replacement for physical documents, photos, or paintings. They’re just an additional way of storing them.

Tansey argues that digitization is one strategy, but it’s not a complete solution. Plainly, she said, it’s expensive to scan, upload, and describe records so that they’re searchable in catalogs. Digital archives also have to be maintained, just like physical archives. What happens if the community relevant to an archive is forced to relocate?

“Let’s say you have a city that effectively, over the next 100 years, becomes abandoned, Tansey said. “There’s no more tax base. Who is now responsible for maintaining the records of that city that no longer exists? Even if you can digitize them, someone still has to pay for domain registration. Someone still has to pay the storage costs of keeping those records as accessible files. And PDFs are great now, but what’s the file format going to be 100 years from now?”

A Day at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery Archives

Green-Wood Cemetery buried its first person in 1840. About 47,000 people lived in Brooklyn at the time. Now, Green-Wood is populated by about half-a-million, all dead. The people who work there eagerly refer to the dead as the cemetery’s “permanent residents.”

Image: Tony Cucchiara opens a chronology book at the Green-Wood Cemetery archives. Taken by Caroline Haskins.

The job of Green-Wood Cemetery archivist Cucchiara is to work with on-staff archivists and volunteers to accomplish three things: minimize the speed at which materials deteriorate, make those materials accessible to researchers, and eventually, at some point in the future, digitize those records and make them all public.

He also oversees a group of volunteers who, for the past 10 years, has been working on “rehousing” documents from regular paper folders to alkaline, acid-free folders.

“We have a very intrepid group of volunteers that come in on Sundays about every six weeks, and they work for five to six hours straight,” Cucchiara said. “20 to 25 people, opening folding and unfolding and flattening these materials. It takes a lot of effort to do this. This is all hand work, that’s the only way we can do it.”

Cucchiara said the volunteers are generally graduate students and retirees. “They’re actuaries, they’re attorneys, they’re chemists, they’re teachers, who in their retirement, have a great interest in and love of history,” he said.

The work of these volunteers is dramatically extending the lifetime of these documents. Common materials can often destroy sensitive documents. For instance, regular folders and rubber bands are often acidic. When acid migrates from paper to paper, the documents deteriorate quickly. Metal paper clips can also rust on paper sheets, and scotch tape is impossible to remove without damaging the document.

So lot by lot, cabinet by cabinet, floor to ceiling, these workers have rehoused millions of documents from acidic danger to alkaline safety. There’s two main “groups” of archival records at Green-Wood: the lot burial orders, and the chronology books.

Image: Chronology book at the Green-Wood Cemetery archives. This shows the very first burials at the site.

Burial orders pertain to what’s in a “lot,” or a patch of grass that could house dozens to thousands of graves. These lots are either private (and expensive) or public (and more densely packed). The lot burial orders contain highly specific information about each person in a burial spot, like cause of death, when they died, age, whether they were married or single, and even the addresses of family members, businesses with which they were associated. If it’s a private lot, which were expensive even at the turn of the century, there might even be even drawings and diagrams of the lot in question.

The chronology books, meanwhile, consist of 60 volumes of extra large pizza box-sized books documenting the burial of every single person from 1840 to 1937. These books also include individual information like place of birth and cause of death.

This information is valuable, but maintaining it all is incredibly expensive. Sets of acid-free document cases can cost hundreds of dollars. 100-packs of alkaline folders cost about $30. Plastic paper clips cost more than metal paper clips. Green-Wood also uses 13 mobile storage “carriages.” These costs add up quickly when you’re dealing with millions of pages of records. Eventually digitizing the records and making them searchable online, Cucchiara said, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. He emphasized that digitization won’t occur until far into the future.

Probably the least expensive way that Green-Wood protects its documents is through constant monitoring the temperature and humidity in the places the archives are stored. Once a week, Cucchiara said, he retrieves the monitors and uploads the information to a database, which tracks changes in the facilities over time. Cucchiara said that both the database and the monitors are inexpensive.

The charts are remarkably consistent. The only blips in temperature were in the middle of the winter. Cucchiara explained that the archivers would turn up the temperature a few degrees so they could work with the documents comfortably.

Image: Climate monitoring device at the Green-Wood Cemetery archives.

Image: Climate monitoring database used by Green-Wood Cemetery archivers.

Green-Wood Cemetery in a Changing Climate

There’s a divide within Green-Wood. On one hand, there’s the heavy stones above ground and the metal caskets below ground. They’re built to withstand rain, wind, heat, snow, flooding, and ice. These are supposed to be durable monuments to memory. And on the other hand, there’s the paper archives. Millions of volumes of incredibly delicate paper records, stored in expensive alkaline folders in climate-controlled faults, and handled delicately. These are the fragile monuments to memory.

But it was the outdoor structures, the durable monuments to memory, that were damaged during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Cucchiara said that the archives, which would have become moldy and unreadable if they touched floodwater, were unharmed. There were no broken windows, no damaged roofs, nothing. The facilities didn’t even lose power.

Cemeteries were conceived as a way of separating and containing the dead. But they’ve never aimed to forget the dead. That’s why cemeteries have stone monuments and metal caskets designed to last multiple generations. One day, maybe when humans are dead and gone, we’ll have a layer of the Earth’s crust that’s embedded with cemetery stone and metal. Maybe, in this human-layer of the Earth, we’ll have gravestones torn apart by climate change-fueled superstorms, alongside AirPods, plastic, and everything else that capitalism has managed to make but not destroy.

But even a broken cemetery monument is a privilege for the few, the likes of turn-of-the-century New York elites and their descendants. Being in a paper archive, likewise, is a privilege. It’s a ticket into cultural memory. But not everyone is afforded that privilege.

Consider the loss of records that occurred after Hurricane Katrina: Thousands of living people experienced “identity loss” when their personal documents were destroyed. Photographs, films, paintings, and historical documents in homes and museums, testaments to the history of the people who have lived on the Gulf Coast, were destroyed. People living in the Gulf region have just as much of a right to be remembered as the people of Green-Wood. But there’s a social and economic barrier of entry to visibility that not everyone can pass.

The Future of Archives

At the time of writing, Hurricane Dorian is winding down after ravaging the Bahamas and barreling up the east coast of the United States. The Bahamas, from what we know now, have been devastated. An estimated 15,000 people don’t have food or shelter. Many lives have clearly been lost, but we don’t know how many. Entire cities have been flooded and leveled, but we don’t have a precise sense of what’s been lost and what’s left.

Climate change is not a distant threat, or an abstract. It’s killing people right now. It’s devastating communities and destroying human culture right now.

Tansey said that going forward, the goal of the Repo Data Project is to make it as robust as possible, as inclusive as possible, and as up-to-date as possible. The team already used the grant provided by the Society of American Archivists, so right now, a priority is finding a financial pathway to maintaining stewardship over the data.

In August, Tansey and co-principal investigator Ben Goldman were honored by the Society of American Archivists for their work on the project.

Around the same time the Repo Data Project got started, in early 2017, Tansey became involved with a decentralized collective called Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change). The group hasn’t been consistently active since it was created. But on September 20, the same day as the Global Climate Strike, the group is co-hosting two teach-ins in—one in Austin, Texas and one in Vancouver, British Columbia—with Archivists Against History Repeating Itself, a collective whose mission is to use archives to “address” and “repair” injustice perpetrated by “white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, and capitalism.”

“These Teach Ins will provide insights and serve as a launching point for future actions against climate change,” the event description says. “By joining international efforts to raise awareness of climate change, archivists can join the global community to tell leaders across the world that we demand climate action.”

As for Green-Wood, it’s unclear what a changing climate will mean for its yellow and purple wildflowers, cooing crickets, and grass cut down to a height of exactly three inches by a landscaping staff. Green-Wood will certainly continue to receive money to maintain its living plants and the papers of the dead. Maybe the cemetery vegetation will wither in climate change-driven heat, or be blown apart by future superstorms. The papers, meanwhile, will probably last as long as the community that it represents continues to exist. Maybe in a couple centuries or millennia, Brooklyners will retreat or die off, and Brooklyn as we know it ceases to exist. Maybe then, the papers will drop into the earth and feed a city of worms.

Climate Change Could Erase Human History. These Archivists Are Trying to Save It syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[yeskraim]

Inside the U.S. military’s raid against its own security guards that left dozens of Afghan children dead

AZIZABAD, Afghanistan – Once the Americans left, the survivors started digging.

There were too many dead and not enough shovels, so a local politician brought in heavy machinery from a nearby construction site. He dug graves deep enough to fit mothers with children, or children with children. Some were still in their pajamas, their hands inked with henna tattoos from the party preparations the night before.

Villagers picked through the rubble of what had been an entire neighborhood, looking for remains to wrap in white linens for burial. A boy clutching a torn rug walked in a daze on top of the ruins. A young man collapsed in grief by a pile of mud bricks where his home once stood – where his wife and four children had been sleeping inside.

The local doctor recorded a cellphone video to document the dead faces, freckled with shrapnel and blood, coated with dust and debris. Some were Afghan men of fighting age, but most – dozens of them – were women and children. Taza was 3 years old. Maida was 2. Zia, 1.

The hot summer wind kicked up dust, smoke and the smell of gunpowder as villagers tried to make sense of why their remote village was demolished by an American airstrike in the middle of the night.

A clue was found near several of the dead Afghan fighters: ID badges from the private security company at the American-controlled airfield up the road.

Why had a team of U.S. soldiers and Marines battled its own paid security detail?

After more than a decade, those who buried their families still don’t know.

U.S. military officials publicly touted the August 22, 2008, Azizabad raid – Operation Commando Riot – as a victory. A high-value Taliban target had been killed; the collateral damage was minimal; the village was grateful.

None of it was true.

The Taliban commander escaped. Dozens of civilians were dead in the rubble, including as many as 60 children. The local population rioted.

It remains one of the deadliest civilian casualty events of the Afghan campaign. But the story of how the operation turned tragic has been largely hidden from the public.

USA TODAY spent more than a year investigating the Azizabad raid and sued the Department of Defense to obtain almost 1,000 pages of investigative files previously kept secret because it had been deemed “classified national security information.” The records included photographs of the destruction in Azizabad and sworn testimony from the U.S. forces who planned and executed the operation.

SHOW OF FORCE

This is an ongoing series of reports about G4S, the world’s largest private security force, which provides guards for thousands of private businesses and government agencies across the nation. Reporters at USA TODAY and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel spent more than a year gathering records and interviewing current and former employees, as well as those impacted by violence associated with G4S guards.

Contact the reporters

Brett Murphy

Gina Barton

Nick Penzenstadler

USA TODAY also obtained Afghan government records, evidence collected by humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross, and a confidential United Nations investigation into the incident.

In addition, a reporter traveled to western Afghanistan to interview government officials, investigators, first responders, witnesses and the villagers who survived.

MORE: How we reported the deadly airstrike: A reporter’s notebook from Afghanistan

Together, the records and interviews tell the story of a disaster that was months in the making as military and company officials ignored warnings about the men they had hired to provide intelligence and security. The records also reveal that the Defense Department has for years downplayed or denied the fatal mistakes surrounding the tragedy.

The problems began in 2007 when ArmorGroup, a private security company working on a Pentagon subcontract, hired two local warlords on the U.S. intelligence payroll to provide armed guards at an airfield on the western edge of Afghanistan.

Those warlords fought each other for control of the weapons and money ArmorGroup was giving out. The tangle of espionage and tribal infighting eventually drew in the very same military units that had helped empower the warlords in the first place.

The breakdowns in the U.S. military intelligence machine culminated with the raid itself. Some troops were never warned of Azizabad’s civilian population, and the special operations commanders who did know unleashed devastating force from the air anyway. Ground troops directed an American gunship to demolish house after house where at least one insurgent took cover, without knowing who else was inside.

“If they fled into the building, we were asking him to basically drop the building,” a Marine who was coordinating with the gunship testified. Most of the names were redacted from the military investigation.

Much about the mission in Azizabad remains in dispute, but this much is clear: The architects behind this corner of the war – and those profiting from the security contract – did not understand the difference between who they were supposed to be fighting, employing and protecting.

There still is no definitive death toll. After initially insisting that only five to seven civilians died, Pentagon officials were forced to adjust that figure to 33 after photos and videos of the carnage proved the official account wrong. Separate reviews by the Afghan government, Red Cross, United Nations and Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission put the civilian deaths over 70.

After two Pentagon investigations, the U.S. military denied any wrongdoing. Defense Department officials declined to comment for this story.

A 2010 Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry laid blame with both ArmorGroup and the Defense Department for doing business with the warlords. In response to the Senate report, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a letter recognizing problems with contract oversight, which he pledged to fix.

Show caption Hide caption

An excerpt of sworn testimony taken from the fire control officer aboard the AC-130 gunship. The officer was in charge of selecting the munitions and… An excerpt of sworn testimony taken from the fire control officer aboard the AC-130 gunship. The officer was in charge of selecting the munitions and coordinating with the ground team to shoot at targets in Azizabad.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, VIA CENTRAL COMMAND

Yet in the aftermath of the Azizabad raid, records show, military leaders sought to present an image of success and mask evidence of a civilian casualty disaster. The false version of events was amplified by Oliver North – a former Marine commander and a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s – who was embedded as a Fox News contributor with the forces conducting the raid. North’s segment, which presents the mission as a success and the Taliban commander “confirmed dead,” is still available on the Fox News website.

North did not respond to multiple interview requests. In an email, Fox News spokeswoman Caley Cronin did not address North’s segment and directed questions to North, “who is no longer a contributor with the network,” she wrote.

Lt. Colonel Rachel E. VanLandingham, a retired officer with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and the chief of international law at Central Command’s headquarters during the Azizabad raid, said the commanders responsible for investigating the incident seemed to ignore the failures instead of learning from them. She did not know the details of the operation or the military’s response until contacted by USA TODAY.

“The CENTCOM investigation seemed more worried about looking good than being good,” VanLandingham, now a law professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said in an interview. “Everyone who deploys in Afghanistan should know this incident.”

Show caption Hide caption

Villagers picked through the rubble for days after the airstrike. The U.S. military officials originally said only five to seven civilians were killed. But they… Villagers picked through the rubble for days after the airstrike. The U.S. military officials originally said only five to seven civilians were killed. But they did not look beneath the rubble. They adjusted that figure to more than 30 later.

Fraidoon Pooyaa

G4S, the largest private security company in the world, purchased ArmorGroup in 2008 – after the company had signed its contract with the Pentagon to provide security at the airfield but before the Azizabad raid. The company’s role has remained virtually unknown other than a literal footnote in the Senate inquiry.

Executives at ArmorGroup, which G4S dissolved into another subsidiary it later sold in 2014, considered their decisions at the time to be the best option to keep those inside the base safe under difficult circumstances, according to emails collected by Senate investigators.

“Without the leadership and management” of company staff, the “worst could have caused the project to fail long before the August tragedy,” one said.

David McDonnell, a former ArmorGroup director who oversaw mine clearing projects in Afghanistan

“It was wholesale slaughter. And it didn’t need to be.”

G4S declined to comment for this story, except to state that ArmorGroup is a former G4S subsidiary that wasn’t under the direct control of the parent company.

But some of the employees who were operating the air base contracts near Azizabad agreed to speak out publicly for the first time.

“It was wholesale slaughter,” David McDonnell, a former ArmorGroup director who oversaw mine clearing projects in Afghanistan, said in a recent interview. “And it didn’t need to be.”

His colleague, Tony Thompson, worked with some of the villagers killed in the raid. Thompson told USA TODAY he has spent much of the past decade wrestling with the truth kept secret all this time.

“Their families died, and they still don’t know why,” he said. “You’ll never bring them back. But you need to know how and why it happened.”

The Shindand District air base, on the southern border of Afghanistan’s Herat Province, was first built by the Soviets in the 1960s. A graveyard of abandoned Russian aircraft and land mines spread across open fields on both sides of the perimeter fence. The base is a 9-square-mile campus in a remote but strategic location between Iran’s eastern border and the Ring Road, which circles all of Afghanistan.

In a district that has long been controlled or contested by the Taliban, the airbase sits amid a major drug and arms trafficking route. The Taliban funds much of its national operation with the opium-poppy fields in the district’s Zerkoh Valley.

In April 2007, ArmorGroup – a private security company based in London – won a $5.1 million Air Force subcontract to guard construction workers building an expansion of the airfield for the Afghan National Army. (The company’s American subsidiary, ArmorGroup North America, based in Virginia, technically managed the contract). ArmorGroup had worked in more than 160 countries around the world and was known mostly for protecting oil and gas sites.

ArmorGroup agreed to a Pentagon requirement that it fill the guard positions by hiring nearby villagers. It was part of the Pentagon’s economic stimulus plan for Afghanistan, but it also was less expensive than bringing in guards from outside the country.

“We are a commercial company, of course, we are looking to do the business as cheap as possible,” a company official later told U.S. military investigators. 

Shindand’s 450 villages are some of the most impoverished in the Herat Province. Many rural areas do not have running water or paved roads. Day laborers find work wherever they can, including across the border in Iran. A low-ranking Afghan National Police officer could earn roughly $70 a month.

At $275 a month, the guard jobs at the air base represented the best opportunity some would see in a lifetime. 

ArmorGroup officials had no say in whom they would hire to pick the villagers. According to interviews and testimony, U.S. military personnel instructed ArmorGroup managers to let two local men – Timor Shah and Nadir Khan – select who could become guards.

The company assigned them code names: Mr. White for Shah and Mr. Pink for Khan. The names were an homage to Reservoir Dogs, the Quentin Tarantino classic film in which thieves betray and murder one another after an armed robbery.

Mr. White and Mr. Pink, two local patriarchs and sons of Shindand, would staff the guard positions from their extended families. The men were cousins, lifelong friends and business partners in the district. Their legitimate operations included car rentals and electronic stores in the northern city of Herat.

But U.S. intelligence and company officials believed that both men were burgeoning warlords with possible criminal and Taliban affiliations, according to interviews with local officials, testimony in the Pentagon investigation and memos from the Senate inquiry.

In rural Afghanistan, the line between village elder, warlord and legitimate Taliban is often blurred, which can confound outsiders trying to track allegiances on the ground.

Allegations of Pink and White’s illicit backgrounds weren’t necessarily a problem anyway. Military intelligence officers inside the airfield had been building a vast network of paid informants across the region, enticing them with money in exchange for information about Taliban meetings and the location of high-value targets.

White and Pink were both intelligence assets.

Lal Mohammad Umarzai, the Shindand governor at the time of the Azizabad raid, said he was never consulted about the possible implications of empowering White and Pink at the airfield.

Brett Murphy, USA TODAY

Lal Mohammad Umarzai, the Shindand governor at the time, told USA TODAY in an interview that he was never consulted about the wisdom of giving two warlords hundreds of thousands of dollars, access to an armory of automatic weapons and virtual control over Shindand. The district is one of the most diverse in Afghanistan, with complex tribal dynamics and a history of power struggles.

Had somebody reached out to him for advice, Umarzai said, he would have warned U.S. officials that White and Pink would bring trouble.

“They were the two most corrupt families in Afghanistan,” Umarzai said.

White and Pink initially split the work down the middle. They showed up in June 2007 outside the fence of the airfield with about 20 men each.

According to the Senate inquiry, ArmorGroup could not demonstrate that it had sent armed guard rosters or training records to the U.S. government, a violation of Department of Defense regulations.

“Normally in a country, if we were going to employ local people, they would be interviewed, qualification checks, names go to the government for security backgrounds,” McDonnell said in an interview. “None of that happened in Shindand. All of the normal procedures we would carry out didn’t happen because we were directed who to work with by the American forces.”

USA TODAY filed a public records request with the Air Force for documents about the armed employees – records the agency was required to collect and maintain, according to the contract. An Air Force official said those documents could not be located because they “might not have been processed or archived … due to the sensitive nature.”

Within weeks of starting the contract, Pink and White made the same calculation: Controlling half of the money and jobs was good. But having everything would make one of them untouchable.

They grew paranoid of each other. The resentment turned violent, and there were a series of shootings and bombings around Shindand that officials would blame on the feud between the two men.

Pink made at least one attempt on White’s life as he was leaving the air base. ArmorGroup officials grew increasingly worried that its guards would try to kill one another or leave their posts, according to internal memos and emails compiled in the Senate inquiry.

In December 2007, tribal elders brokered a cease-fire and called for White and Pink to settle their differences. A meeting was arranged for Dec. 12 in the Azizabad bazaar, a short strip of open-air shops on either side of the Ring Road.

White and Pink approached each other in the market, where villagers sold bread, fruit and home appliances.

Just before they reached each other, Pink pulled out a gun and shot White three times. A gunfight broke out in the market between ArmorGroup guards loyal to each man. Several civilians were wounded.

When the chaos ended, White was dead.

The Air Force project manager in Kabul reported the assassination to U.S. military officials, according to the Senate inquiry. But little changed.

“The incident did not give rise to a broader discussion at (the Air Force) about the wisdom of relying on two warlords to provide security,” the investigators wrote.

Pink, however, lost his job as an informant. ArmorGroup also fired him from the air base.

Fearing retribution from White’s family, Pink went into hiding in a nearby village with local Taliban militia. He was later involved in a series of kidnappings and other violent crimes, according to intelligence reports cited in the military investigation and internal company memos collected by the Senate investigators.

Military officials at the base went as far as nominating Pink as a high-priority target because “he was a force protection problem for the area,” one Marine testified during the Pentagon investigation. But U.S. commanders denied the request and decided instead to closely monitor him.

The airfield construction project continued, and ArmorGroup needed someone else to handle staffing guards at the air base.

So the company hired Reza Khan, White’s brother. They called him Mr. White II.

White II was another intelligence asset for the military personnel inside the air base. In one conversation with his handler, he disclosed that his nephew was Mullah Sadeq, a notorious Taliban commander operating in the Farah Province, just south of Shindand. Sadeq built and supplied improvised explosive devices around the region.

The Italian military had placed Sadeq on the high-priority-target list. U.S. special operations forces inside the air base had been tracking Sadeq for months in hopes of pinning down his exact location.

“It was really no surprise to us that (White II) had bigger connections with the Taliban than previously suspected,” White II’s Marine intelligence handler testified during the Pentagon investigation. “He had been playing both sides and ultimately we were actually looking to cut his ties that he had with us.”

Instead, military intelligence officers saw him as the key to taking down Sadeq.

In May 2008, London-based private security giant G4S bought ArmorGroup for $85.4 million. The acquisition came as the company expanded to more than 100 countries and took on dangerous business some of its competitors avoided, including mine clearing and base security in the Middle East.

The Shindand contract was already underway when G4S became the corporate parent. The company left ArmorGroup operationally independent with the same Afghanistan managers in place.

In July, Thompson, who worked for the company’s mine clearing division on a U.N. contract at the base, reported to executives in Afghanistan the threat White II posed. Thompson wrote that local police and the Afghan National Army had confiscated at White II’s Azizabad home stockpiles of unlicensed weapons and land mines. Guards had left the base with company weapons to moonlight as White II’s personal escorts.

Company officials expressed in interviews with investigators “permanent concern” about a full-scale war between militias loyal to Pink and White II. 

“I would hate to see our people as the meat in the sandwich,” McDonnell, the company director, wrote in an email responding to the report.

Records show that ArmorGroup officials dealt with their concerns about White II by asking him to give a verbal assurance every week that the conflict wouldn’t escalate.

Around the same time, an Army Sergeant told White II’s intelligence handler that the warlord was funneling money from the air base contract – wages meant for the guards – straight to Taliban commanders. He was rebuffed.

“They know about it,” the sergeant told Senate investigators. “But they didn’t want to talk about it, for whatever reason.”

Through the spring and summer of 2008, special operations forces lost at least three of their own in the area.  

On May 29, Sergeant First Class David Nunez, 27, of Los Angeles was on his third deployment with the Army Special Forces when his unit came under fire in the Farah Province desert plains. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for saving others from their vehicle as it became engulfed in flames. He had two sons.

A month later, five Marine special operators with the Second Battalion were gravely wounded while looking for a Taliban commander. Marine Staff Sgt. Edgar Heredia died. Heredia, 28, was a native of Houston and the son of two Mexican immigrants.

On a separate mission in the Zerkoh Valley, Marine Captain Garrett “Tubes” Lawton, 31, died when an IED detonated by his vehicle.

The leaders commanding these units were facing intense scrutiny. Night raids and air campaigns were often followed by reports of civilian casualties, an almost inevitable outcome when insurgents live and fight among their civilian neighbors.

Frank Rosenblatt, a retired Lt. Colonel and JAG who has written several books and studies about the military justice system, called 2008 “a time of strategic rudderlessness” for the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.

He said military leaders rushed into operations that could be touted to the American public, often at the cost of the local population they were supposed to be protecting.

“Commanders wanted to be seen getting after it,” Rosenblatt said.

Mir Abdul Kalik, the former deputy governor in Shindand, was part of the Afghan government delegation investigating civilian casualties in Azizabad.

Brett Murphy, USA TODAY

The Taliban used the civilian deaths to recruit new militia members, and Afghan citizens grew increasingly wary of the tactics of American forces.

“The Taliban are always telling people, ‘Look at the Americans, they came to kill you and your kids,’” said Mir Abdul Kalik, the former deputy governor in Shindand. “A huge gap has been created between the Afghans and the Americans.”

The sentiment had reached Kabul, where then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai repeatedly condemned the use of American gunships in urban areas.

“We can no longer accept the civilian casualties the way they are occurring,” Karzai said.

But the airstrikes continued. On July 6, an airstrike in Nangarhar province inadvertently killed 47 Afghan civilians, misidentified as insurgents, during a wedding. Two weeks later, another airstrike accidentally killed nine Afghan National Police officers in Farah province.

In August, two assets – code-named Romeo and Juliet – told their intelligence handler at the air base news he had been waiting on for months: Mullah Sadeq was coming to meet his uncle, White II, at his home compound in Azizabad.

For the first time since the Americans had been tracking him, Sadeq would be within 20 miles of the base.

The information was met with skepticism. Romeo and Juliet were known associates of Mr. Pink, so intelligence officers considered the possibility that Pink could have orchestrated the leak as a way to have U.S. forces attack White II. Was this a setup?

“I’ve thought about that before,” one of the intelligence officials later testified in the military investigation. “But these guys, they give me pretty reliable information on who, what, when, and where.”

Romeo and Juliet had provided good intelligence for missions into the Zerkoh Valley that summer. Plus, the intelligence office reckoned, White II himself had corroborated his relationship to Sadeq.

It was too good of an opportunity to pass up. As a bonus, Oliver North and a Fox cameraman would tag along for the mission for their ongoing “War Stories” dispatches.

The regional commanders green-lighted an operation to capture or kill Sadeq and approved an AC-130 gunship, often dubbed “hell in the sky,” for close air support. Operation Commando Riot was a go.

In the days before Sadeq was scheduled to arrive, the U.S. forces at the base worked with Afghan commandos to draw up a minute-by-minute plan.

Romeo and Juliet said Sadeq would show up with more than two dozen militia sometime before midnight for a meeting inside White II’s compound. The house was surrounded by other homes on three sides and a large courtyard to the southeast. Each structure was built with mud bricks as dense as concrete. A wide alley led directly to the compound.

Romeo and Juliet had a contact attending the meeting who would call as soon as Sadeq arrived.

To maintain the element of surprise, the mission would need to be a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

Driving pickup trucks, a team of 12 from the Second Marine Special Operations Battalion would lead the strike. Army Special Forces and Afghan commandos would follow 10 minutes behind. The total attack force would be roughly 80 men.

Captain Elliot Ackerman would be the assault force commander with the Marines going in first.

She survived the airstrike that killed her family

Gul Rukh survived the air strike that killed her family, but wishes she hadn’t.

Video by Brett Murphy, Shahpoor Sabir, Aleem Agha and Jasper Colt, USA TODAY

Ackerman, 28 at the time, was commissioned as an officer right after college. He had earned numerous medals, including the Silver Star for saving fellow Marines four years earlier during the second battle of Fallujah, the bloodiest engagement of the Iraq War.

Because most of the names were redacted from the testimony in the military investigation, it’s not clear whether Ackerman was the commander who ultimately led the entire Azizabad operation. He declined multiple interview requests for this story. 

The laws of war require that all feasible precautions are taken to avoid harming civilians. To reduce collateral damage, experts and activists urge a “pattern of life analysis” – hours of reconnaissance in the target area ahead of a mission so everyone going in, including air support, understands how many civilians are present and where they are located.

But in Shindand, the troops were relying largely on third-hand information and a general understanding of villages in the area, the intelligence officers later told investigators. Even the intelligence assets, Romeo and Juliet, had not recently visited Azizabad themselves for fear of being identified.

A lead intelligence officer and a Marine commander were aware that a funeral ceremony for families was planned for the day after Sadeq was set to arrive, according to their testimony with military investigators. However, almost everybody else involved with the planning and execution of operation Commando Riot testified that they were not told about a civilian gathering.

“Everybody that was going to be at that meeting were Taliban commanders with their security guys,” a communications sergeant testified later. “There wasn’t supposed to be any women and children.”

It is unclear why that information was not widely known or whether it had been reported up the chain of command before the mission and the gunship were approved.

The morning of August 21, Gul Rukh piled her four kids into her cousin’s car and headed north on the Ring Road to her parents’ house in Azizabad. Hundreds of villagers around the Zerkoh Valley and Farah Province had received invitations to commemorate the death of a prominent village elder eight months earlier.

His name was Timor Shah – also known as the original Mr. White.

Rukh, 39, stopped in the city of Shindand to go shopping for the ceremony. She bought new clothes for her kids and a wooden chest to keep tchotchkes. It was the type of splurging Rukh reserved only for special occasions.

When they arrived in Azizabad that evening, families gathered in the courtyard around outdoor fire pits and got to cooking. They slaughtered 16 sheep and cooked rice in steel drums.

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Hundreds of villagers around the Zerkoh Valley and Farah Province had received invitations to commemorate the death of Timor Shah (also known as Mr. White.)… Hundreds of villagers around the Zerkoh Valley and Farah Province had received invitations to commemorate the death of Timor Shah (also known as Mr. White.) After the raid, those who survived showed the local reporters and government investigators the invitations.

Fraidoon Pooyaa

Rukh’s sons, Dawa, 10, Ghani, 6, and Nabi, 5, and her daughter, Rahima, 9, spent most of the daylight hours kicking a soccer ball with their cousins. When the sun went down, the kids darted between houses playing hide and seek. They painted henna tattoos on one another’s hands.

Once most of the food was prepared, families peeled off for bed. The houses were too full, so many camped in the courtyard. It was cool enough to sleep outside comfortably, and the lucky ones had mosquito nets.

Rukh stayed up past midnight talking with her parents, mostly listening, while they tried persuading her to stay a couple of extra days after the ceremony. They finally drifted off to sleep.

The call from the contact inside the compound came just before 1:30 a.m.: Sadeq is here.

While the troops mounted into their trucks, a soldier knocked on the trailers around the garrison to roust North and the Fox cameraman. North emerged in military fatigues and night vision goggles and headed toward the convoy.

“What the hell was Oliver North doing there?” McDonnell, one of the ArmorGroup directors, said in a recent interview. “He wasn’t passing through for a cup of tea. This was set up to put on a show.”

The intelligence officers who helped plan the mission climbed to the top of the garrison barracks and faced Azizabad, 18 miles to the south. They watched the AC-130 pass overhead.

The Marines in the two lead pickup trucks turned off the Ring Road and toward the compound around 2 a.m. They heard a single pop from a rifle. That was the warning shot alerting the compound that enemies were incoming.

They saw a light on in White II’s compound. The trucks rumbled over the dirt, through a narrow passage with walls on each side at least 8 feet high.

A water truck parked at the near end of the alley blocked the route into the compound. The Marines hopped out to proceed on foot.

Gunshots poured in from the west and north. The fire felt as if it was coming from directly above.

Bullets peppered the walls next to the crouching Marines. They returned fire to the rooftops, where they could see flashes from rifle bursts through their night vision goggles. It was the most constant, accurate fire some of them had ever experienced since coming to Afghanistan, they testified later.

Marine Gunnery Sgt. Joseph “Willy” Parent took a round through his foot.

They were pinned down. The commander shot two red flares into the air so the other units trailing behind could find them. He would later testify that he did not consider retreat a viable option.

“For the reputation and just the credibility of coalition,” the commander said, adding that withdrawing from a fight with the Taliban when you are so far committed is “completely inconceivable and unacceptable.”

The 12 Marines who had exited the trucks moved into a building, where a woman and child were huddled in the corner. There, the Marines set up a base of operations.

The commander told the radio controller next to him to call the gunship in the air, circling at 10,000 feet. The enemy was “danger close.”

The controller yelled into the radio for immediate fire on the insurgents approaching them in the alley.

The gunship crew heard panic on the other line and got to work. They used high-powered cameras to scan around the courtyard and the surrounding buildings.

Then, they unleashed 40-millimeter and howitzer rounds into the alley and onto rooftops. Some exploded above the ground and flung 14,000 shrapnel fragments per round into a rainbow pattern.

Some targets appeared to be running, and others were taking up positions. But identifying people from the air alone was impossible, the pilot would later tell investigators.

It was like going “out into a field in the middle of the night on about a quarter moon light, and you see a dark shape moving through the field,” the pilot said. 

For two hours, the air crew coordinated with the commander on the ground to blast apart buildings where the enemy fighters took up positions. Troops lay prone on the far side of a domed roof to peek across the courtyard and relay information to the gunship.

“If they fled into the building, we were asking him to basically drop the building,” the controller on the ground later testified.

The gunship blasted room by room, house by house, until there was nobody left shooting.

In total, the gunship fired 82 howitzer rounds and 242 of the 40-millimeter rounds. The barrage ended with a 500-pound bomb dropped onto White II’s compound.

Daylight broke through the clouds of dust and smoke.

Rukh couldn’t feel her legs. Shrapnel had shredded her spine.

Her hearing was muffled behind a low hum, but she was conscious and saw everything. Through the debris, she could make out her oldest son’s pistachio pajamas. He was dead. And so was her mother, who was just a few feet away.

The rest of her family was beneath the rubble of a clay roof, 18 inches thick, that had collapsed to the ground. They were crushed to death. Rukh desperately cried out for a glass of water.

The American forces found her and two children – not her own – still breathing. They pulled them from the rubble, which was chest deep in areas where the roofs had collapsed. One child died almost immediately. The other, a 5-year-old girl named Kobra, was shaking as they carried her to a medic. Her face was vacant and coated in dust.

An Afghan boy carried a torn rug next to his destroyed home in Azizabad the day after the raid.

Fraidoon Pooyaa, AP

The troops photographed what was left of other insurgents’ bodies – but only those visible above the rubble. Altogether, they found seven dead men with guns around them and six dead civilians.

Among the dead was White II.

The source who called Romeo and Juliet to confirm Sadeq had arrived was also dead. “He took one for the team,” a military official testified. 

The troops cordoned off the neighborhood for three hours while a team of Army Special Forces operators went door to door with the Afghan commandos to clear the buildings and collect weapons, explosives and documents. They blew up a cache of land mines in one of the buildings.

There was no sign of Sadeq.

Just after 9 a.m., the convoy left for the air base with what they had seized: 14 automatic rifles, 15 mines, 4,000 bullets, 32 magazines, stacks of U.S. and Afghan currency, 19 cellphones, boxes of documents – and ArmorGroup ID badges found near some of the dead men.

They also left with five prisoners in blindfolds. Two of them were ArmorGroup guards at the air base.

The convoy returned to a barbeque at the airfield.

“It was just something I’ve never experienced before: singing and dancing and everybody seemed to be happy,” said Thompson, who had just learned several of his employees were likely killed. “The whole thing was a bit surreal.”

Thompson’s colleague sent a desperate report to the Air Force over concerns the surviving employees might turn their guns on one another or the men inside the base in revenge.

“We are currently on full alert and are expecting once the dead are buried an attack of some sort,” ArmorGroup Senior Team Leader Nigel McCreery wrote.

All 43 local guards abandoned the base to go look for their family members.

“At this time I’m unsure as to how many (ArmorGroup) local guards who were off duty have been killed or wounded,” McCreery wrote.

“The next 24hrs will tell the tale.”

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Oliver North was embedded with the Marines and soldiers on Operation Commando Riot as a contributor for Fox News. The Fox segment, accompanying online story… Oliver North was embedded with the Marines and soldiers on Operation Commando Riot as a contributor for Fox News. The Fox segment, accompanying online story and chapter in North’s book presented a false depiction of a successful mission.

Andrew Sullivan, AP

After a week-long inquiry, Central Command said in a press release that the raid disrupted a planned attack on the air base and more than 30 Taliban fighters were killed. “The evidence suggested” Sadeq was among them, the statement said. The release claimed that five to seven civilians also died.

Fox News ran a segment hosted by North “confirming that Mullah Sadeq is dead.” The report included footage of Rukh and Kobra being stabilized at the air base before surgery. He did not report the fact that Rukh was paralyzed or that Kobra died in the hospital soon after.

North also wrote a chapter about the raid in his book, “American Heroes in Special Operations.”

It appeared the U.S. “had achieved a stunning success,” he said in his book and an online story accompanying the Fox video.

After the raid, the Azizabad villagers picked through the rubble and compiled a list of the dead: 91 total, including 60 children.

Then they rioted. Confused and furious, about 200 villagers marched on the Ring Road hurling rocks at reporters and police officers. They set fire to an Afghan National Army vehicle and shot at soldiers.

In front of local television cameras, the villagers held up their ArmorGroup badges, evidence of their loyalty to the U.S. forces. They showed the invitations to the funeral commemoration, evidence of a civilian gathering, not a Taliban meeting.

During a riot after the raid, security guards from the airbase who survived were confused and furious. They flashed their ArmorGroup badges in front of reporters’ cameras to show their alliance with coalition forces.

Fraidoon Pooyaa

This version of events was diametrically opposite to what the Pentagon and North’s Fox News segment had presented. Among skeptical Afghan and even some ArmorGroup officials, it seemed plausible that Mr. Pink had duped U.S. forces into taking down his bitter rival.

“You got to hand it to Pink,” an ArmorGroup manager wrote in an email collected by the Senate investigators, “pretty shrewd.”

President Karzai was just finishing a lunch meeting in the presidential palace hall in Kabul when government officials from Shindand walked in carrying a white linen, bundled up like a bag.

They waited for everyone to finish eating and unwrapped the contents on the floor: Severed fingers from Azizabad. Too small to be from adult men.

“Everybody was weeping looking at that,” Mohammad Omar Daudzai, Karzai’s former chief of staff, said in an interview.

During the riot after the raid, villagers threw rocks at Afghan police, set fire to a police vehicle and chased away government officials.

Fraidoon Pooyaa, AP

After a phone call with then-President George W. Bush, Karzai flew to the Shindand airfield, where he met with reporters and a crowd of locals. He condemned the “irresponsible and imprecise” military operation. 

“I have been working day and night in the past five years to prevent such incidents, but I haven’t been successful,” Karzai said. “If I had succeeded, the people of Azizabad wouldn’t be bathed in blood.”

Karzai paid $2,000 for each of the 91 victims. It was the standard solatia, “blood money,” payment for mourners. He also promised to rebuild the destroyed homes in Azizabad.

Karzai fired the Afghan National Army General who was in charge of the Afghan commandos on the mission. He ordered his intelligence agency to arrest Mr. Pink for providing false information to the Special Operations forces.

An Afghan woman mourns during a ceremony in Azizabad. She is holding a poster with photos of her family member killed in the August 22 raid.

Fraidoon Pooyaa, AP

In the days and weeks that followed, investigators from the U.N., Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and Red Cross flew into Shindand to investigate the death toll discrepancy.

International media outlets published more accounts from witnesses and the geopolitical firestorm it had created between Washington and Kabul. New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall reported new evidence from the ground – including another child’s body she discovered – which raised more questions about the American narrative.

But the Pentagon continued to publicly claim Sadeq had been killed, and officials denied to the media that there had been mass civilian casualties. At the same time, military officials worked behind the scenes to steer the narrative back in a more favorable light.

Abdul Salam Qazizad, a local politician who was part of the Afghan government’s delegation to Azizabad, was called to the Shindand air base two weeks after the raid, he said in an interview.

He said two military officers presented the U.S. forces’ point of view and asked him to walk back statements he had made on television about mass civilian casualties.

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Abdul Salam Qazizad was part of the Afghan government’s delegation to Azizabad. In the aftermath, he was vocal about the civilian casualties. He said the… Abdul Salam Qazizad was part of the Afghan government’s delegation to Azizabad. In the aftermath, he was vocal about the civilian casualties. He said the U.S. military called him to the airbase and asked him to walk back his public statements.

Brett Murphy, USA TODAY

“But I told them, ‘I am not doing that,’” Qazizad recalled. “‘Humans make mistakes. You made a mistake. Come and tell the people that you made it.’”

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission received a similar message from the U.S. government. Ahmad Nader Nadery was head of the group at the time and now leads the Afghan government’s administrative reform and civil service commission.

He summarized the group’s findings for Pentagon officials, including the large number of civilian deaths.

“They said, ‘This is all bulls—t,’” Nadery recalled in an interview. “I ended the meeting and said, ‘Well, thank you.’”

Brigadier Gen. Michael Callan’s phone rang at 1 a.m. one night in early September.  Callan, a decorated pilot, was enjoying the sunset of a three-decade military career at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A call like this was unusual.

On the other end of the phone was someone claiming to be Maj. Gen. Jay Hood, chief of staff at Central Command in Tampa, Fla. He said he had a secret assignment for Callan in Afghanistan.

Callan thought it was a prank phone call and went back to bed.

A few days later, after more phone calls and official emails confirmed the situation, Callan said goodbye to his wife and kids and boarded a flight to Kabul.

A grainy cellphone video had emerged, taken from the local doctor from inside the Azizabad mosque. It showed a chaotic scene of dozens of bodies lined up and wrapped in linens while survivors wailed.

The Pentagon could no longer maintain its public position and was forced to open a new, full-scale investigation. Callan was picked to lead it.

He had never handled such an inquiry before, but he reckoned his experience as a special operations pilot qualified him for the job. His team included two military lawyers, two Marines, two Army majors and a translator.

“Our mission was to get the facts on what happened that night,” Callan wrote in a statement to USA TODAY. “Given the heightened media attention, we needed to focus on this event, leave our ‘real jobs’ behind and complete the investigation.”

After meeting with General David McKiernan, then-commander of the International Security Assistance Force, Callan’s team fanned out to gather evidence from the other organizations that had already investigated the Azizabad raid.

The United Nations, Red Cross, Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and Afghan government investigations had differing views of how many Taliban were in the village, if there were any at all.

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The U.S. special operations forces seized weapons, land mines and bullets after the raid. They also found ArmorGroup ID badges carried by some of the… The U.S. special operations forces seized weapons, land mines and bullets after the raid. They also found ArmorGroup ID badges carried by some of the dead men. This photo was one of many pieces of evidence collected by military investigators during the 15-6 investigation.

U.S. Department of Defense, via Central Command

But what was clear to each group was the count of the dead was far greater than what the Pentagon had claimed.

The confidential U.N. report concerning the Azizabad raid, which has never been made public before, is the most exhaustive and methodical. The organization’s accounting of the casualties included the name of each victim, age, home village and father’s name. The report includes several pictures of babies wrapped in the white linens. The investigators, who made four trips to the village, noted the number could never be considered final or certain without exhuming the bodies.

“It is evident that the low number of injured is due to the fact that most, if not all, persons present in the houses that were destroyed in fact died,” they wrote.

The U.N. investigation concluded that 10 of the fighting age men who were killed in the raid were ArmorGroup employees and that some of the guns confiscated by the U.S. Forces belonged to the company.

U.N. investigators also tried to determine whether U.S. officials had visited the village after the raid to gather facts in the immediate aftermath.

“The answer from numerous witnesses is no,” the U.N. report states. “No forces have returned to the village since the incident.”

Callan met with U.N. officials in Kabul on Sept. 18. He asked them to show him their investigation and the evidence they had collected in Azizabad, according to internal U.N. communications and memos.

Emails show the U.N. officials were wary of trusting the Bush administration “to admit culpability for wrong-doing.” But they decided it was best to provide their inquiry and some supporting evidence with the understanding that Callan’s team would coordinate the final U.S. report with them before anything went public.

Two weeks later, U.S. Central Command, led at the time by Lt. General Martin Dempsey, published a summary of Callan’s findings. CENTCOM exonerated the military of any war crimes, violations of the rules of engagement and most other allegations raised by the villagers. Callan’s team never briefed the U.N.

CENTCOM’s full 15-6 investigation, which includes more than 1,500 pages of sworn testimony, photographs, videos and other evidence, was never released. The Pentagon denied journalists and activists who requested it, citing national security considerations.

USA TODAY received most of the records, but not the videos, after suing the Defense Department in 2018.

Afghan men look at a destroyed house in Azizabad the day after the raid. The mud roofs that collapsed on top of insurgents and civilians were dense as concrete and 18 inches thick.

Fraidoon Pooyaa, AP

Callan’s executive summary said that 55 people died in Azizabad after a proportional response from U.S. forces acting in self-defense: 33 civilians, including 12 children, and 22 anti-coalition insurgents, some of whom were likely employees of ArmorGroup.

It concluded that the Taliban violated the laws of war by choosing to fight alongside women and children. CENTCOM dismissed villagers’ testimony about a higher count of dead civilians.

“This would be akin to dismissing all eyewitness testimony during a criminal trial conducted in the U.S.,” a U.N. official wrote in an internal memo after the Pentagon made the summary public.

CENTCOM did not acknowledge the intelligence breakdowns that left most of the force unaware of the funeral ceremony. It also did not explain why regional commanders approved the use of close air support for multiple hours despite information that women and children were in the village.

Lt. Colonel VanLandingham, the law professor and former chief of international law at CENTCOM, said those leaders seemed to fail to take all precautions to avoid civilian harm and then skirted accountability during the investigation.

“Heads should have rolled for that,” she said. “There should have been consequences for that failure.”

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An Afghan man who lost his relatives during the airstrike in Azizabad. He was waiting for a gathering in which then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke… An Afghan man who lost his relatives during the airstrike in Azizabad. He was waiting for a gathering in which then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke to villagers and reporters about the incident on Sept. 4, 2008.

Fraidoon Pooyaa, AP

The public summary also did not include an array of testimony from U.S. forces that cast a negative light on what had happened. For example, Callan concluded that “Operation Commando Riot was not triggered by clan-on-clan rivalry.” However, intelligence officers testified that the information about the Taliban meeting was sound but driven by the feud between Pink and White.

Perhaps most notably, the summary did not admit that Sadeq had survived the raid. Intelligence officials told the military investigators he had most likely escaped through an underground cavern just north of the compound.

Sadeq “according to our (human intelligence) sources, is alive and well in his traditional operating area,” one of the officials testified. It’s unclear from the records whether Sadeq is still alive.

Callan did not respond to specific critiques of the investigation and the omissions from the public summary. In an email to USA TODAY, he said his team “unequivocally conducted the most comprehensive review of this mission of any investigation accomplished to date.” They “left no stone unturned,” Callan said. 

In the public summary, CENTCOM discounted evidence collected by outside inquiries, including those from the U.N., as tainted by political or financial agendas.

Former U.N. officials defended their work and the veracity of the investigation.

“We really did want the Americans to stop killing people. We really did want the Talibs to stop killing people,” Norah Niland, the Human Rights Director at the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan at the time, said in a recent interview. “That was the agenda.”

But U.N. officials decided against publicly criticizing the Pentagon’s shortfalls to avoid “generating a lot of hostility,” according to an internal U.N. memo.

“It is not advisable to reopen the issue again,” they wrote.

Gul Rukh, whose parents and four children died, now spends most of her days alone. She can peel potatoes or string together bracelets but is unable to move anything below her waist. She doesn’t have a wheelchair, so her brothers carry her around in their arms.

Five pieces of shrapnel are still embedded in her spine. Doctors say they can’t get them out without risking further paralysis in her hands and tongue.

Gul Rukh, a survivor of the raid in Azizabad, is still paralyzed from the waist down from the shrapnel that embedded in her spine. She cannot afford a wheelchair so her brother must carry her.

Brett Murphy, USA TODAY

Rukh feels the same way now as she did when she first woke up in the hospital.

“I wish I was dead too,” she said in a recent interview. She called herself a burden on her family – more like an object or piece of furniture in the house, rather than a person living in it.

“I got accustomed to it,” Rukh said, “and I lost hope.”

Today, the Taliban controls the Shindand District. Azizabad is in quiet ruins. Fewer than two dozen families live there.

The houses leveled in the raid were never repaired. The neighborhood is a pile of mud bricks and walls scarred with bullet holes.

Daudzai, Karzai’s former chief of staff, said he didn’t know the government had failed to deliver on its promises to rebuild Azizabad.

“We should have done it,” he said in an interview. “We are also equally guilty.”

A row of flat, marble tombstones stands upright in the cemetery near the mosque. The epitaph over the grave of Reza Khan, known to some as White II, reads: “Innocently martyred in the coalition airstrike.”

Construction projects on the air base finished in 2013, and it’s still in control of the Afghan National Army.

Days after the raid, ArmorGroup hired someone else to take over the staffing: White II’s brother, Gul Ahmed. They called him Mr. White III.

In an interview, he conceded that Sadeq was his nephew but denied that his brother hosted him that night. He said there were no Taliban in the village that night.

“I lost my son and my relatives, close friends, and everyone,” Ahmed said. “It is mind-blowing.”

He added of the U.S. forces involved in the Azizabad raid: “They will never accept that they had killed civilians.”

In 2010, the Senate Armed Services Committee launched an inquiry into the Air Force’s failures to provide oversight on the contract. Investigators found a litany of lapses and linked ArmorGroup, Pink and White II to the doomed mission.

But there were no congressional hearings or public reckoning. G4S, ArmorGroup’s parent company, was only mentioned in a footnote in the Senate report. The company has collected more than $6 billion from taxpayers through federal contracts since 2005, according to government data.

The Afghan federal government sentenced Mr. Pink to death in 2009 after he was convicted of espionage and for giving false information to U.S. forces. He appealed and is now in Bagram prison.

Pink’s son, Mirwais Khan, who was also once a guard at the airfield, denied that his father was a spy or responsible for the civilian casualties.

“We had our enemies, and our enemies accused us,” he said in an interview. “My father was not the president, he was not a military commander, not a corps commander to order the airstrike. The airstrike was conducted and commissioned by Americans.”

Show caption Hide caption

Gul Ahmed, a village elder in Azizabad, was hired to replace his brother, White II, at the airfield. The company called him Mr. White III…. Gul Ahmed, a village elder in Azizabad, was hired to replace his brother, White II, at the airfield. The company called him Mr. White III. In an interview, he conceded that Sadeq was his nephew but denied that his brother hosted him that night. He said there were no Taliban in the village that night.

Brett Murphy, USA TODAY

Ackerman, the Marine assault force commander on the mission, is now an accomplished author and columnist. He has been vocal about his service and often writes about the human cost of the wars he fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he has never spoken publicly or written about what happened in Azizabad. 

Most of the troops who testified in the CENTCOM investigation were not identifiable from the interview transcripts. They largely denied that anything had gone wrong or that there had been large numbers of civilian casualties.

Callan’s interviews ended with the same question for some of those who planned the Azizabad raid: If you could do it again, would you change anything? 

“No sir,” one intelligence officer responded. “I wouldn’t do anything different.”

The team behind this investigation

REPORTING AND ANALYSIS: Brett Murphy, Gina Barton, Nick Penzenstadler

EDITING: Chris Davis, Matt Doig, Sam Roe, Brett Blackledge

GRAPHICS AND ILLUSTRATIONS: Ramon Padilla, Kyle Slagle, Mitchell Thorson, Shawn Sullivan, Javier Zarracina, Ray Soto, Will Austin, Alex Daley-Montgomery, Alan Davies

PHOTOGRAPHY: Jasper Colt, Chris Powers, Brett Murphy, Shahpoor Sabir

DIGITAL PRODUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT: Spencer Holladay, Annette Meade, Ryan Hildebrandt, Dan Alegria

SOCIAL MEDIA, ENGAGEMENT AND PROMOTION: Cara Richardson, Elizabeth Shell

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What Assets Can I Keep In Chapter 7?

Individuals who petition for financial protection look for security from their loan bosses for the obligations they have caused. The U.S. Constitution gives this capacity to the government, and the central government has set up U.S. Bankruptcy Courts to deal with bankruptcy procedures the nation over. At the point when an individual petitions for financial protection security, the individual in question can hope to need to turn over a sizeable part of their property to an alleged bankruptcy domain. A bankruptcy trustee deals with this bankruptcy home, offering property to fund-raise to satisfy a borrower’s lenders. Be that as it may, a bankruptcy borrower does not really need to turn over everything to the bankruptcy domain.

In a Chapter 7 liquidation case, the borrower needs to surrender certain property to the bankruptcy trustee. Account holders, regardless of whether they are organizations or people, are regularly legitimately worried about what property they will be permitted to keep and what they should surrender. Bankruptcy law enables account holders to keep a specific measure of property in the wake of experiencing bankruptcy procedures. This is classified “excluded” property – it is absolved from the bankruptcy home. Property that can’t be exempted is, suitably, called “non-excluded” property. For the most part, a bankruptcy account holder can absolved a specific measure of his or her property during bankruptcy. Whenever done right, this can possibly spare the greater part of the property of somebody experiencing bankruptcy. Property that is absolved can for the most part be known as the “necessities of present day life.”

This by and large incorporates the kind of things that are vital for living and working. Bankruptcy law is worried about getting account holders out of pounding obligation and returning them on their feet. Taking everything from them is counterproductive, and bankruptcy law perceives this reality. Non-excluded property for the most part covers things that fall outside of the necessities for living and working. Court decisions and general practice experience have built up a general thought of what sorts of property are excluded and non-absolved. The following are instances of property that a Chapter 7 account holder will as a rule need to surrender (“non-excluded” property), and property that the indebted person may generally keep (“absolved” property).

Property That Is Not Exempt Things that the indebted person for the most part needs to surrender include:

• Costly melodic instruments, except if the indebted person is an expert performer

• Accumulations of stamps, coins, and other important things

• Family legacies

• Money, financial balances, stocks, securities, and different ventures

• A subsequent vehicle or truck

• A second or getaway home

• Property That Is Exempt

• Excluded property (things that an account holder may generally keep) can include:

• Engine vehicles, up to a specific worth

• Sensibly essential dress

• Sensibly essential family unit merchandise and decorations

• Family unit apparatuses

• Gems, up to a specific worth

Benefits of bankruptcy exempts are as follow:

• A segment of value in the indebted person’s home

• Instruments of the indebted person’s exchange or calling, up to a specific worth.

• A bit of unpaid however earned wages

• Open advantages, including open help (welfare), standardized savings, and joblessness pay, gathered in a financial balance.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Code records 21 distinct classifications of obligations that can’t be released. Maybe the most widely recognized obligations that can’t be released under any conditions are tyke backing and support. In the event that you document for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, you will likewise keep on owing any apartment suite or participation affiliation expenses, alongside whatever other obligations that were not released in an earlier bankruptcy. Understudy credits are famously hard to release; it is just conceivable on the off chance that you can exhibit undue hardship that is perpetual or expected to keep going for a lion’s share of the life of the note.

Notwithstanding, a 2014 controlling in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals utilized a progressively indulgent limit in releasing a Webster University understudy’s obligation. You can’t release personal expense obligations without an exceptional exclusion, which must be gotten by requesting of the bankruptcy court and clarifying why you merit alleviation. Lenders have some capacity to prevent certain obligations from being released and the capacity to movement the court to allow them help from the programmed remain that keeps them from seeking after accumulation action. Individual advances from companions, family and managers fall under basic classifications of obligation that can be released on account of bankruptcy. A release discharges singular borrowers from the lawful commitment to pay already existing obligations.

Different kinds of dischargeable obligation incorporate Mastercard charges, accounts from accumulation offices, doctor’s visit expenses, past due service bills, and shamed checks and common court expenses not regarded deceitful. Dischargeable obligation likewise incorporates business obligations, cash owed by rent understandings, lawyer expenses not related with youngster backing and provision grants, rotating charge accounts, Social Security and veterans help excessive charges, and in uncommon cases, understudy loans. Personal credits from companions, family and bosses fall under normal classifications of obligation that can be released on account of bankruptcy. A release discharges singular borrowers from the legitimate commitment to pay already existing obligations. Different sorts of dischargeable obligation incorporate Visa charges, accounts from gathering organizations, doctor’s visit expenses, past due service bills, and disrespected checks and common court charges not considered deceitful.

Dischargeable obligation additionally incorporates business obligations, cash owed by rent understandings, lawyer expenses not related with youngster backing and support grants, spinning charge accounts, Social Security and veterans help excessive charges, and in uncommon cases, understudy credits.

The Utah bankruptcy exemptions chart, see below, details the property you can exempt or protect from creditors when you file bankruptcy in Utah. You may exempt any property that falls into one of the exemptions categories below, up to the dollar amount listed. You will be able to kept this exempted property after you file bankruptcy. Please note that there are certain debts which you will not be able to erase in bankruptcy. In exemption limit applies to any equity you have in the property. Equity is the difference between the value of the property and what is owed on the property.

For example, a car valued at $5000 with a loan of $4500 has an equity value of only $500. If the property is secured by a loan, such as a car or home, and you are current on the payments and the equity is covered by your exemptions, you may elect to keep making payments on the loan and keep this property through the bankruptcy. If all the equity is not covered by your exemptions the trustee may elect to liquidate this asset and distribute the proceeds. Generally, in this case, you would be entitled to the value of your exemption in the asset as a cash payment. Bankruptcy law allows married couples filing jointly to each claim a full set of exemptions, unless otherwise noted. To keep non-exempt property, a debtor must generally pay the trustee the value of the non-exempt property. When you file bankruptcy in Utah you may also use certain federal exemptions in addition to your Utah exemptions.

Real property, mobile home or water rights to $10,000 (joint owners may double)—one must file homestead declaration before attempted sale of home. And disability, illness, medical or hospital benefits, fraternal benefit society benefits, and life insurance policy cash surrender value to $1500—Life insurance proceeds if beneficiary is insureds spouse or dependent, as needed for support. Alimony needed for support—child support and property of business partnership. Then there are personal property such as: animals, books & musical instruments to $500 total, artwork depicting, or done by, family member, and bed, bedding, carpets, washer & dryer, and burial plot along with clothing (cannot claim furs or jewelry), Food to last 3 months. Furnishings & appliances to $500,Health aids needed, Heirloom or other sentimental item to $500, Motor Vehicle to $2,500, Personal injury recoveries for you or person you depended on, Proceeds for damaged exempt property, Refrigerator, freezer, microwave, stove & sewing machine, and Wrongful death recoveries for person you depended on.

Addendum to that Tools of Trade that are exempted are as follow: Implements, books & tools of trade to $5,000, Military property of National Guard member, and Motor vehicle to $3,00. Minimum 75% of earned but unpaid wages; bankruptcy judge may authorize more for low-income debtors Some states allow you to choose between using the state exemptions and a list of federal bankruptcy exemptions. In Utah, however, you do not have this choice; you must use the Utah bankruptcy exemptions. Although you can’t use the federal exemptions in Utah, you may use any of the federal non-bankruptcy exemptions. The federal non-bankruptcy exemptions protect property such as federal retirement accounts and veterans’ benefits. You can use both the federal non-bankruptcy exemptions and the state exemptions; you don’t have to choose between the two lists.

In a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy Case, all of a Debtor’s non-exempt property becomes the property of the bankruptcy estate at the time of filing and may be sold by the bankruptcy trustee. The sale proceeds are then distributed among the Debtor’s creditors. Exempt property is protected property. Under Federal and State exemption laws, certain assets are protected from collection by Creditors and from a Bankruptcy Trustee in a Chapter 7 case. In addition, exempt property is relevant in formulating a Chapter 13 Plan and calculating the required return to unsecured Creditors. An initial inquiry for all individuals contemplating bankruptcy is “Which State’s exemptions apply to my case?” Exemptions which apply to a Debtor’s case are based on the law of the State where the debtor was domiciled for the 730 days (2 years) prior to the date of filing the bankruptcy case. If you did not reside in a single State during the two years prior to filing, the exemptions are determined by the State where you were domiciled for the majority of the 180 days that preceded the 730-day period. Section 522(b). Section 522(b) also provides that if the effect of the domiciliary requirement is to render the debtor ineligible for any exemption, the Federal exemptions would apply.

The Utah Exemptions Act is set forth at Utah Code, Title 78, Chapter 23. The following is a brief summary of the most commonly claimed exemptions in this Statute. Please refer to the statute for a detailed analysis of the exemption(s) you seek to claim.

The Homestead laws in the State of Utah are presently very favorable to Debtors. Individuals can claim a homestead exemption in their primary residence in the amount of $30,000 per person, and $5,000 per person if the property is not the primary residence of the individual. The homestead exemption is applied to home equity. Home equity is computed by deducting from the fair market value of the real property, the amounts of all outstanding mortgages and loans against such real property. Example: Your home is worth $100,000.00 and you have a first mortgage against your home in the amount of $40,000.00, and a home equity line of credit with a balance of $20,000.00. You therefore have $40,000.00 of equity in your home. If you are an individual debtor, your equity would not be fully exempt, and a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy Trustee could sell your property and distribute the sale proceeds among your Creditors. The full text of the Utah homestead exemption law is set forth at Utah Code Section 78b 5-503 and 504. Each individual is entitled to an exemption for one motor vehicle not exceeding $3,000 in value. If you are filing jointly with your spouse and you share one vehicle, you can each assert the vehicle exemption against the same vehicle. If the equity in the vehicle you share is not more than $6,000.00, it would be protected from bankruptcy. The vehicle exemption is applicable to motorcycles if the motorcycle is your primary means of transportation.

In spite of the fact that the government bankruptcy code gives a rundown of exclusions, these exceptions are not accessible in Utah. Utah law expects you to utilize the exclusions found in state law – not the U.S. bankruptcy code. In spite of the fact that the government bankruptcy code gives a rundown of exclusions, these exceptions are not accessible in Utah. Utah law expects you to utilize the exclusions found in state law – not the U.S. bankruptcy code.

Bankruptcy Attorney Free Consultation

When you need legal help with a bankruptcy in Utah, whether it is a chapter 7 bankruptcy, a chapter 13 case, a chapter 9, a chapter 11 or a chapter 12 bankruptcy, please call Ascent Law LLC [phone] for your Free Consultation. We want to help you.

Ascent Law LLC 8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite C West Jordan, Utah 84088 United States Telephone: [phone]

Ascent Law LLC

4.9 stars – based on 67 reviews

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Source: https://www.ascentlawfirm.com/what-assets-can-i-keep-in-chapter-7/

[aretia]

What Assets Can I Keep In Chapter 7?

Individuals who petition for financial protection look for security from their loan bosses for the obligations they have caused. The U.S. Constitution gives this capacity to the government, and the central government has set up U.S. Bankruptcy Courts to deal with bankruptcy procedures the nation over. At the point when an individual petitions for financial protection security, the individual in question can hope to need to turn over a sizeable part of their property to an alleged bankruptcy domain. A bankruptcy trustee deals with this bankruptcy home, offering property to fund-raise to satisfy a borrower’s lenders. Be that as it may, a bankruptcy borrower does not really need to turn over everything to the bankruptcy domain.

In a Chapter 7 liquidation case, the borrower needs to surrender certain property to the bankruptcy trustee. Account holders, regardless of whether they are organizations or people, are regularly legitimately worried about what property they will be permitted to keep and what they should surrender. Bankruptcy law enables account holders to keep a specific measure of property in the wake of experiencing bankruptcy procedures. This is classified “excluded” property – it is absolved from the bankruptcy home. Property that can’t be exempted is, suitably, called “non-excluded” property. For the most part, a bankruptcy account holder can absolved a specific measure of his or her property during bankruptcy. Whenever done right, this can possibly spare the greater part of the property of somebody experiencing bankruptcy. Property that is absolved can for the most part be known as the “necessities of present day life.”

This by and large incorporates the kind of things that are vital for living and working. Bankruptcy law is worried about getting account holders out of pounding obligation and returning them on their feet. Taking everything from them is counterproductive, and bankruptcy law perceives this reality. Non-excluded property for the most part covers things that fall outside of the necessities for living and working. Court decisions and general practice experience have built up a general thought of what sorts of property are excluded and non-absolved. The following are instances of property that a Chapter 7 account holder will as a rule need to surrender (“non-excluded” property), and property that the indebted person may generally keep (“absolved” property).

Property That Is Not Exempt Things that the indebted person for the most part needs to surrender include:

• Costly melodic instruments, except if the indebted person is an expert performer

• Accumulations of stamps, coins, and other important things

• Family legacies

• Money, financial balances, stocks, securities, and different ventures

• A subsequent vehicle or truck

• A second or getaway home

• Property That Is Exempt

• Excluded property (things that an account holder may generally keep) can include:

• Engine vehicles, up to a specific worth

• Sensibly essential dress

• Sensibly essential family unit merchandise and decorations

• Family unit apparatuses

• Gems, up to a specific worth

Benefits of bankruptcy exempts are as follow:

• A segment of value in the indebted person’s home

• Instruments of the indebted person’s exchange or calling, up to a specific worth.

• A bit of unpaid however earned wages

• Open advantages, including open help (welfare), standardized savings, and joblessness pay, gathered in a financial balance.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Code records 21 distinct classifications of obligations that can’t be released. Maybe the most widely recognized obligations that can’t be released under any conditions are tyke backing and support. In the event that you document for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, you will likewise keep on owing any apartment suite or participation affiliation expenses, alongside whatever other obligations that were not released in an earlier bankruptcy. Understudy credits are famously hard to release; it is just conceivable on the off chance that you can exhibit undue hardship that is perpetual or expected to keep going for a lion’s share of the life of the note.

Notwithstanding, a 2014 controlling in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals utilized a progressively indulgent limit in releasing a Webster University understudy’s obligation. You can’t release personal expense obligations without an exceptional exclusion, which must be gotten by requesting of the bankruptcy court and clarifying why you merit alleviation. Lenders have some capacity to prevent certain obligations from being released and the capacity to movement the court to allow them help from the programmed remain that keeps them from seeking after accumulation action. Individual advances from companions, family and managers fall under basic classifications of obligation that can be released on account of bankruptcy. A release discharges singular borrowers from the lawful commitment to pay already existing obligations.

Different kinds of dischargeable obligation incorporate Mastercard charges, accounts from accumulation offices, doctor’s visit expenses, past due service bills, and shamed checks and common court expenses not regarded deceitful. Dischargeable obligation likewise incorporates business obligations, cash owed by rent understandings, lawyer expenses not related with youngster backing and provision grants, rotating charge accounts, Social Security and veterans help excessive charges, and in uncommon cases, understudy loans. Personal credits from companions, family and bosses fall under normal classifications of obligation that can be released on account of bankruptcy. A release discharges singular borrowers from the legitimate commitment to pay already existing obligations. Different sorts of dischargeable obligation incorporate Visa charges, accounts from gathering organizations, doctor’s visit expenses, past due service bills, and disrespected checks and common court charges not considered deceitful.

Dischargeable obligation additionally incorporates business obligations, cash owed by rent understandings, lawyer expenses not related with youngster backing and support grants, spinning charge accounts, Social Security and veterans help excessive charges, and in uncommon cases, understudy credits.

The Utah bankruptcy exemptions chart, see below, details the property you can exempt or protect from creditors when you file bankruptcy in Utah. You may exempt any property that falls into one of the exemptions categories below, up to the dollar amount listed. You will be able to kept this exempted property after you file bankruptcy. Please note that there are certain debts which you will not be able to erase in bankruptcy. In exemption limit applies to any equity you have in the property. Equity is the difference between the value of the property and what is owed on the property.

For example, a car valued at $5000 with a loan of $4500 has an equity value of only $500. If the property is secured by a loan, such as a car or home, and you are current on the payments and the equity is covered by your exemptions, you may elect to keep making payments on the loan and keep this property through the bankruptcy. If all the equity is not covered by your exemptions the trustee may elect to liquidate this asset and distribute the proceeds. Generally, in this case, you would be entitled to the value of your exemption in the asset as a cash payment. Bankruptcy law allows married couples filing jointly to each claim a full set of exemptions, unless otherwise noted. To keep non-exempt property, a debtor must generally pay the trustee the value of the non-exempt property. When you file bankruptcy in Utah you may also use certain federal exemptions in addition to your Utah exemptions.

Real property, mobile home or water rights to $10,000 (joint owners may double)—one must file homestead declaration before attempted sale of home. And disability, illness, medical or hospital benefits, fraternal benefit society benefits, and life insurance policy cash surrender value to $1500—Life insurance proceeds if beneficiary is insureds spouse or dependent, as needed for support. Alimony needed for support—child support and property of business partnership. Then there are personal property such as: animals, books & musical instruments to $500 total, artwork depicting, or done by, family member, and bed, bedding, carpets, washer & dryer, and burial plot along with clothing (cannot claim furs or jewelry), Food to last 3 months. Furnishings & appliances to $500,Health aids needed, Heirloom or other sentimental item to $500, Motor Vehicle to $2,500, Personal injury recoveries for you or person you depended on, Proceeds for damaged exempt property, Refrigerator, freezer, microwave, stove & sewing machine, and Wrongful death recoveries for person you depended on.

Addendum to that Tools of Trade that are exempted are as follow: Implements, books & tools of trade to $5,000, Military property of National Guard member, and Motor vehicle to $3,00. Minimum 75% of earned but unpaid wages; bankruptcy judge may authorize more for low-income debtors Some states allow you to choose between using the state exemptions and a list of federal bankruptcy exemptions. In Utah, however, you do not have this choice; you must use the Utah bankruptcy exemptions. Although you can’t use the federal exemptions in Utah, you may use any of the federal non-bankruptcy exemptions. The federal non-bankruptcy exemptions protect property such as federal retirement accounts and veterans’ benefits. You can use both the federal non-bankruptcy exemptions and the state exemptions; you don’t have to choose between the two lists.

In a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy Case, all of a Debtor’s non-exempt property becomes the property of the bankruptcy estate at the time of filing and may be sold by the bankruptcy trustee. The sale proceeds are then distributed among the Debtor’s creditors. Exempt property is protected property. Under Federal and State exemption laws, certain assets are protected from collection by Creditors and from a Bankruptcy Trustee in a Chapter 7 case. In addition, exempt property is relevant in formulating a Chapter 13 Plan and calculating the required return to unsecured Creditors. An initial inquiry for all individuals contemplating bankruptcy is “Which State’s exemptions apply to my case?” Exemptions which apply to a Debtor’s case are based on the law of the State where the debtor was domiciled for the 730 days (2 years) prior to the date of filing the bankruptcy case. If you did not reside in a single State during the two years prior to filing, the exemptions are determined by the State where you were domiciled for the majority of the 180 days that preceded the 730-day period. Section 522(b). Section 522(b) also provides that if the effect of the domiciliary requirement is to render the debtor ineligible for any exemption, the Federal exemptions would apply.

The Utah Exemptions Act is set forth at Utah Code, Title 78, Chapter 23. The following is a brief summary of the most commonly claimed exemptions in this Statute. Please refer to the statute for a detailed analysis of the exemption(s) you seek to claim.

The Homestead laws in the State of Utah are presently very favorable to Debtors. Individuals can claim a homestead exemption in their primary residence in the amount of $30,000 per person, and $5,000 per person if the property is not the primary residence of the individual. The homestead exemption is applied to home equity. Home equity is computed by deducting from the fair market value of the real property, the amounts of all outstanding mortgages and loans against such real property. Example: Your home is worth $100,000.00 and you have a first mortgage against your home in the amount of $40,000.00, and a home equity line of credit with a balance of $20,000.00. You therefore have $40,000.00 of equity in your home. If you are an individual debtor, your equity would not be fully exempt, and a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy Trustee could sell your property and distribute the sale proceeds among your Creditors. The full text of the Utah homestead exemption law is set forth at Utah Code Section 78b 5-503 and 504. Each individual is entitled to an exemption for one motor vehicle not exceeding $3,000 in value. If you are filing jointly with your spouse and you share one vehicle, you can each assert the vehicle exemption against the same vehicle. If the equity in the vehicle you share is not more than $6,000.00, it would be protected from bankruptcy. The vehicle exemption is applicable to motorcycles if the motorcycle is your primary means of transportation.

In spite of the fact that the government bankruptcy code gives a rundown of exclusions, these exceptions are not accessible in Utah. Utah law expects you to utilize the exclusions found in state law – not the U.S. bankruptcy code. In spite of the fact that the government bankruptcy code gives a rundown of exclusions, these exceptions are not accessible in Utah. Utah law expects you to utilize the exclusions found in state law – not the U.S. bankruptcy code.

Bankruptcy Attorney Free Consultation

When you need legal help with a bankruptcy in Utah, whether it is a chapter 7 bankruptcy, a chapter 13 case, a chapter 9, a chapter 11 or a chapter 12 bankruptcy, please call Ascent Law LLC [phone] for your Free Consultation. We want to help you.

Ascent Law LLC 8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite C West Jordan, Utah 84088 United States Telephone: [phone]

Ascent Law LLC

4.9 stars – based on 67 reviews

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Source: https://www.ascentlawfirm.com/what-assets-can-i-keep-in-chapter-7/

[michaeljames1221]

What Assets Can I Keep In Chapter 7?

Individuals who petition for financial protection look for security from their loan bosses for the obligations they have caused. The U.S. Constitution gives this capacity to the government, and the central government has set up U.S. Bankruptcy Courts to deal with bankruptcy procedures the nation over. At the point when an individual petitions for financial protection security, the individual in question can hope to need to turn over a sizeable part of their property to an alleged bankruptcy domain. A bankruptcy trustee deals with this bankruptcy home, offering property to fund-raise to satisfy a borrower’s lenders. Be that as it may, a bankruptcy borrower does not really need to turn over everything to the bankruptcy domain.

In a Chapter 7 liquidation case, the borrower needs to surrender certain property to the bankruptcy trustee. Account holders, regardless of whether they are organizations or people, are regularly legitimately worried about what property they will be permitted to keep and what they should surrender. Bankruptcy law enables account holders to keep a specific measure of property in the wake of experiencing bankruptcy procedures. This is classified “excluded” property – it is absolved from the bankruptcy home. Property that can’t be exempted is, suitably, called “non-excluded” property. For the most part, a bankruptcy account holder can absolved a specific measure of his or her property during bankruptcy. Whenever done right, this can possibly spare the greater part of the property of somebody experiencing bankruptcy. Property that is absolved can for the most part be known as the “necessities of present day life.”

This by and large incorporates the kind of things that are vital for living and working. Bankruptcy law is worried about getting account holders out of pounding obligation and returning them on their feet. Taking everything from them is counterproductive, and bankruptcy law perceives this reality. Non-excluded property for the most part covers things that fall outside of the necessities for living and working. Court decisions and general practice experience have built up a general thought of what sorts of property are excluded and non-absolved. The following are instances of property that a Chapter 7 account holder will as a rule need to surrender (“non-excluded” property), and property that the indebted person may generally keep (“absolved” property).

Property That Is Not Exempt Things that the indebted person for the most part needs to surrender include:

• Costly melodic instruments, except if the indebted person is an expert performer

• Accumulations of stamps, coins, and other important things

• Family legacies

• Money, financial balances, stocks, securities, and different ventures

• A subsequent vehicle or truck

• A second or getaway home

• Property That Is Exempt

• Excluded property (things that an account holder may generally keep) can include:

• Engine vehicles, up to a specific worth

• Sensibly essential dress

• Sensibly essential family unit merchandise and decorations

• Family unit apparatuses

• Gems, up to a specific worth

Benefits of bankruptcy exempts are as follow:

• A segment of value in the indebted person’s home

• Instruments of the indebted person’s exchange or calling, up to a specific worth.

• A bit of unpaid however earned wages

• Open advantages, including open help (welfare), standardized savings, and joblessness pay, gathered in a financial balance.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Code records 21 distinct classifications of obligations that can’t be released. Maybe the most widely recognized obligations that can’t be released under any conditions are tyke backing and support. In the event that you document for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, you will likewise keep on owing any apartment suite or participation affiliation expenses, alongside whatever other obligations that were not released in an earlier bankruptcy. Understudy credits are famously hard to release; it is just conceivable on the off chance that you can exhibit undue hardship that is perpetual or expected to keep going for a lion’s share of the life of the note.

Notwithstanding, a 2014 controlling in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals utilized a progressively indulgent limit in releasing a Webster University understudy’s obligation. You can’t release personal expense obligations without an exceptional exclusion, which must be gotten by requesting of the bankruptcy court and clarifying why you merit alleviation. Lenders have some capacity to prevent certain obligations from being released and the capacity to movement the court to allow them help from the programmed remain that keeps them from seeking after accumulation action. Individual advances from companions, family and managers fall under basic classifications of obligation that can be released on account of bankruptcy. A release discharges singular borrowers from the lawful commitment to pay already existing obligations.

Different kinds of dischargeable obligation incorporate Mastercard charges, accounts from accumulation offices, doctor’s visit expenses, past due service bills, and shamed checks and common court expenses not regarded deceitful. Dischargeable obligation likewise incorporates business obligations, cash owed by rent understandings, lawyer expenses not related with youngster backing and provision grants, rotating charge accounts, Social Security and veterans help excessive charges, and in uncommon cases, understudy loans. Personal credits from companions, family and bosses fall under normal classifications of obligation that can be released on account of bankruptcy. A release discharges singular borrowers from the legitimate commitment to pay already existing obligations. Different sorts of dischargeable obligation incorporate Visa charges, accounts from gathering organizations, doctor’s visit expenses, past due service bills, and disrespected checks and common court charges not considered deceitful.

Dischargeable obligation additionally incorporates business obligations, cash owed by rent understandings, lawyer expenses not related with youngster backing and support grants, spinning charge accounts, Social Security and veterans help excessive charges, and in uncommon cases, understudy credits.

The Utah bankruptcy exemptions chart, see below, details the property you can exempt or protect from creditors when you file bankruptcy in Utah. You may exempt any property that falls into one of the exemptions categories below, up to the dollar amount listed. You will be able to kept this exempted property after you file bankruptcy. Please note that there are certain debts which you will not be able to erase in bankruptcy. In exemption limit applies to any equity you have in the property. Equity is the difference between the value of the property and what is owed on the property.

For example, a car valued at $5000 with a loan of $4500 has an equity value of only $500. If the property is secured by a loan, such as a car or home, and you are current on the payments and the equity is covered by your exemptions, you may elect to keep making payments on the loan and keep this property through the bankruptcy. If all the equity is not covered by your exemptions the trustee may elect to liquidate this asset and distribute the proceeds. Generally, in this case, you would be entitled to the value of your exemption in the asset as a cash payment. Bankruptcy law allows married couples filing jointly to each claim a full set of exemptions, unless otherwise noted. To keep non-exempt property, a debtor must generally pay the trustee the value of the non-exempt property. When you file bankruptcy in Utah you may also use certain federal exemptions in addition to your Utah exemptions.

Real property, mobile home or water rights to $10,000 (joint owners may double)—one must file homestead declaration before attempted sale of home. And disability, illness, medical or hospital benefits, fraternal benefit society benefits, and life insurance policy cash surrender value to $1500—Life insurance proceeds if beneficiary is insureds spouse or dependent, as needed for support. Alimony needed for support—child support and property of business partnership. Then there are personal property such as: animals, books & musical instruments to $500 total, artwork depicting, or done by, family member, and bed, bedding, carpets, washer & dryer, and burial plot along with clothing (cannot claim furs or jewelry), Food to last 3 months. Furnishings & appliances to $500,Health aids needed, Heirloom or other sentimental item to $500, Motor Vehicle to $2,500, Personal injury recoveries for you or person you depended on, Proceeds for damaged exempt property, Refrigerator, freezer, microwave, stove & sewing machine, and Wrongful death recoveries for person you depended on.

Addendum to that Tools of Trade that are exempted are as follow: Implements, books & tools of trade to $5,000, Military property of National Guard member, and Motor vehicle to $3,00. Minimum 75% of earned but unpaid wages; bankruptcy judge may authorize more for low-income debtors Some states allow you to choose between using the state exemptions and a list of federal bankruptcy exemptions. In Utah, however, you do not have this choice; you must use the Utah bankruptcy exemptions. Although you can’t use the federal exemptions in Utah, you may use any of the federal non-bankruptcy exemptions. The federal non-bankruptcy exemptions protect property such as federal retirement accounts and veterans’ benefits. You can use both the federal non-bankruptcy exemptions and the state exemptions; you don’t have to choose between the two lists.

In a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy Case, all of a Debtor’s non-exempt property becomes the property of the bankruptcy estate at the time of filing and may be sold by the bankruptcy trustee. The sale proceeds are then distributed among the Debtor’s creditors. Exempt property is protected property. Under Federal and State exemption laws, certain assets are protected from collection by Creditors and from a Bankruptcy Trustee in a Chapter 7 case. In addition, exempt property is relevant in formulating a Chapter 13 Plan and calculating the required return to unsecured Creditors. An initial inquiry for all individuals contemplating bankruptcy is “Which State’s exemptions apply to my case?” Exemptions which apply to a Debtor’s case are based on the law of the State where the debtor was domiciled for the 730 days (2 years) prior to the date of filing the bankruptcy case. If you did not reside in a single State during the two years prior to filing, the exemptions are determined by the State where you were domiciled for the majority of the 180 days that preceded the 730-day period. Section 522(b). Section 522(b) also provides that if the effect of the domiciliary requirement is to render the debtor ineligible for any exemption, the Federal exemptions would apply.

The Utah Exemptions Act is set forth at Utah Code, Title 78, Chapter 23. The following is a brief summary of the most commonly claimed exemptions in this Statute. Please refer to the statute for a detailed analysis of the exemption(s) you seek to claim.

The Homestead laws in the State of Utah are presently very favorable to Debtors. Individuals can claim a homestead exemption in their primary residence in the amount of $30,000 per person, and $5,000 per person if the property is not the primary residence of the individual. The homestead exemption is applied to home equity. Home equity is computed by deducting from the fair market value of the real property, the amounts of all outstanding mortgages and loans against such real property. Example: Your home is worth $100,000.00 and you have a first mortgage against your home in the amount of $40,000.00, and a home equity line of credit with a balance of $20,000.00. You therefore have $40,000.00 of equity in your home. If you are an individual debtor, your equity would not be fully exempt, and a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy Trustee could sell your property and distribute the sale proceeds among your Creditors. The full text of the Utah homestead exemption law is set forth at Utah Code Section 78b 5-503 and 504. Each individual is entitled to an exemption for one motor vehicle not exceeding $3,000 in value. If you are filing jointly with your spouse and you share one vehicle, you can each assert the vehicle exemption against the same vehicle. If the equity in the vehicle you share is not more than $6,000.00, it would be protected from bankruptcy. The vehicle exemption is applicable to motorcycles if the motorcycle is your primary means of transportation.

In spite of the fact that the government bankruptcy code gives a rundown of exclusions, these exceptions are not accessible in Utah. Utah law expects you to utilize the exclusions found in state law – not the U.S. bankruptcy code. In spite of the fact that the government bankruptcy code gives a rundown of exclusions, these exceptions are not accessible in Utah. Utah law expects you to utilize the exclusions found in state law – not the U.S. bankruptcy code.

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